I was more experienced with lean transformation by the time I started working for Legal Sea Foods in Boston, Massachusetts. I had seen what was possible when value-creating teams on the frontline gained problem-solving capability and applied it to their own work. I had also seen the downside of what happens when management isn’t close to the work with rhythms and routines for sustaining changes and continuously improving, and when leadership isn’t aligned on the business need and strategy.
Learning Leader Led
In 2014, LEI assigned me as a coach to work with Legal Sea Foods. The company’s transformation began with the same initial play of creating a model site: a single restaurant where lean principles could be explored and needed capabilities could be identified. But unlike my experiences at Starbucks and Kroger, the transformation at Legal Sea Foods was leader-led from the start.
Rich Vellante, Legal Sea Foods’s executive chef, didn’t delegate the learning. He immersed himself in it, participating in virtually all activities in the model restaurant. He sat in on trainings, “mindfully observed” to grasp the initial condition, and helped identify and frame problems that mattered to the business as much as they mattered to the cooks and servers. He even helped run experiments with potential countermeasures that the restaurant team had brainstormed.
Personally, I was inspired by Rich’s commitment to learning before leading!
Boat to Belly
The company wanted to create capacity and free up cash for growth. Lean thinking led them to focus on reducing the lead time from “boat to belly.” In the model restaurant, this meant eliminating unwanted delays for guests.
Guests don’t want to wait for a table, or a server, or their drinks and food, or a check once they’ve finished. They aren’t in a hurry exactly, especially at a nice sit-down restaurant, but they’d rather not feel the urge to glance at their watch and wonder what’s taking so long.
A key measurement for our experimentation was “ticket time” — the lead time between the placement of an order and its finished delivery to the guest. As a baseline, the ticket time standard was set at 15 minutes. Rich and the restaurant team, led by Chef Peter Doire, discovered that the kitchen wasn’t meeting this standard 72% of the time.
Trying to close this gap in performance drove many operational improvements, including changed station layouts and reduced batch sizes for food prep. Not only did the smaller batches reduce the workspace required, thereby reducing cooks’ motion, it also increased the food’s freshness and decreased its waste.
From brewed coffee to rotisserie chicken to baked cod, I’ve found that lean thinking’s potential for the food industry is enormous.
Building Sustainability
After the model restaurant had been created, Legal Sea Foods’ approach to lean transformation notably diverged from Kroger’s and Starbucks’. Before moving ahead to spread the learning and scale the improvements, the executive leadership team learned about hoshin kanri (strategy development, alignment, and execution) and put it into practice.
Since I was inexperienced with hoshin kanri at that time, to support Legal Sea Foods effectively, I got help from another LEI coach, Mark Reich. Mark recently wrote a book about hoshin kanri called Managing on Purpose. In it, he draws from his experience as the hoshin kanri process owner for Toyota North America for seven years, plus a decade spent helping companies, including Legal Sea Foods.
Using hoshin kanri, the Legal Sea Foods’ leadership team clarified its strategy, and aligned on its plans and means for execution. They defined five corporate hoshin objectives, including one to spread and scale what worked at the model restaurant. After visualizing the hoshin in the headquarters, they began meeting monthly to review progress, provide support, and adjust as needed.
Moreover, upon learning about daily management, Rich was adamant that it should be part of the transformations at the other restaurants. He had seen firsthand at the model restaurant that without it, sustainment and continuous improvement do not happen.
Reflection prompt
For your current lean transformation effort(s), how are you and other leaders regularly stepping back from the day-to-day activities to reflect on what’s happening and to adjust as needed? How are you making sure that all aspects of lean transformation are taken into consideration?
A Lean Partnership
Before leaving my reflection on Legal Sea Foods, I’d like to step back and talk about the management system we put in place for the engagement between Legal Sea Foods and LEI. As I noted earlier, they had asked for LEI’s help with creating capacity and freeing up cash. Naturally, LEI thought about tackling that challenge as a “lean transformation.” By this time, I believed strongly in the value of the Lean Transformation Framework for guiding transformation efforts.
On a quarterly cadence, leaders from Legal Sea Foods and LEI got together to reflect on what was happening and adjust the approach accordingly. In fact, the need for hoshin kanri was identified during one of these quarterly reviews.
“Checking and adjusting” lean transformations through a mechanism, like a quarterly review by a “steering team,” has become a standard for all of LEI’s engagements with companies. It’s a practice that I highly recommend for any organization undergoing a lean transformation, whether there’s external support or not.