Lean Dairy Farm author Jana Hocken was a bit of a city girl before she met husband Mat and was immersed in the dairy industry on their return to New Zealand in 2013 to run the Hocken family farm in Manawatu.
“I immediately saw opportunities on the farm to apply lean management because at the end of the day it’s processes,” Hocken says.
“Yes, there are external factors but most of it is around process.
“So over the last two years on-farm we have really focused on it. The first year was basics like putting in an accounting system. We were using paper and hand calculated payslips.”
Hocken has spent the past eight years working as a lean consultant under her business Improve8, working with businesses of all sizes and industries. Lean management is all about optimising work processes by eliminating waste – things that don’t bring value to the end product or customer.
“It’s a management philosophy based on a business culture of continuous improvement. More and more customers are focused on our ethical farming practices that don’t damage our environment. We need processes that deliver this. Lean will help you look at all these elements in your business and help make it more sustainable.”
In 2016 after a conversation with their processor, Open Country, which was interested in lean for its own business, she realised there is a need for lean in farming.
She decided to develop a training programme (LeanFarm), which she rolled out across the country to more than 100 farmers with great success. The programme now also runs in Australia.
“It showed there was an appetite in the market so I then had to think, what is the easiest way to get this information out there?’
“It wasn’t feasible for me to be running around the country speaking to every farmer so I thought I’d just write a book.”
She has spent all her working life in the lean space, either for the leanest company in the world, Toyota, or as a lean consultant. Even her industrial engineering degree was around optimising processes so it’s an area she knows inside out.
“I hate inefficiencies and waste in businesses like waiting in queues or the fact that there are hospital waiting lists due to poor capacity of beds. I really enjoy seeing the tangible difference lean can make to a business.”
During her time as a lean consultant she has seen some incredible things come out of the lean way of life including a large train company reducing its lead-time and costs to commission new trains, a hospital reduce its cancer patient treatment waiting times by weeks and a big organisations saving millions of dollar a year in unnecessary processes.
“It is actually very rewarding when you can see the impact.
“More recently the work that I have been doing in farming with the LeanFarm Project has been quite new and refreshing and something different and I’m really enjoying that. The negative is that I can’t go into a business, even the post office, without seeing the waste and opportunities.”
For any business, farming or non-farming, testing out and establishing a new way of doing things can be challenging and lean is no exception. The key to incorporating lean comes down to people.
“For any business the challenge is getting the team to own it and sustainability. The way to overcome that is to make sure the team is involved in every step, creating visual-management boards, planning and problem solving everything together.
“I think for a lot of farmers, accepting that their business has waste and their way of doing things may not be the best can be a hard pill for some farmers to swallow. It’s confronting but if you are open to improvement then you’ll reap the rewards.”
The book took about a year of ad hoc work while still working with her clients, juggling the farm work and looking after then one and three-year-olds. With the book starting to take form she went in search of publishers.
“They gave me a time line of August 2018 to finish the full book so that it could go through the editing phase and be ready for print release in February/March. Those last few months were more intense – some late nights working on it.”
“Once the manuscript was handed over in August there was lots of editing work,” she says.
“We had to put all diagrams into a black and white format, we did seven revisions and I had to redo diagrams to make them look good in black and white. That process was quite intense with tight deadlines. This was while I was still doing a few consulting contracts so I would get back to the hotel after all day being on site at around 7pm and work on it in a restaurant over dinner until 1am – quite exhausting.”
With the family farm to run, a book to write, a Nuffield trip for Mat, her client work and renovating a property in Sydney, all with two young children, it’s fair to say 2017-18 was challenging and exhausting for the Hockens and she admits life is still hectic and busy. With another two business books in the works she has become the master of multitasking, time management and teamwork.
“I am trying to reduce the amount of travel I do with client work and take on only a few client engagements each year. When I am on client engagement its full-time work. When I am home I try to spend a little bit of time each day on different things like a few hours on farm stuff, another couple on my business admin and, of course, the children who are always my priority.”
With Mat having a busy schedule of on and off-farm commitments they rely heavily on good scheduling and regular sit-downs to discuss and record their upcoming travel and work commitments to ensure someone is always home with the kids.
“You just need to be organised but we are also quite adaptable and don’t make things into a big deal. It is kind of the norm for us. I don’t have any family around so Mat’s mum is also pretty much our saviour here.
“She helps out a lot and adapts to our busy lives and we are very grateful. We are both quite active and have goals and ambitions and we support each other a lot in achieving these. Doesn’t mean it is always easy. And we are trying to slow down. “
She admits some people might think she’s nuts for always having more than one project on the go but she it keeps life interesting and exciting and keeps in line with her thoughts when she first moved to the farm.
“As a city girl coming into the rural setting seven years ago I had the attitude that just because we are farming now it doesn’t mean we can’t do anything else. I think a good balance is vital, particularly for mental health.”
The Hockens hope to get their farm to a condition where it can be a benchmark lean farm that other farmers can visit and see how lean can be implemented.
Continuing to spread the message about how lean can help all types of farmers the world over will remain a priority as part of The LeanFarm Project with countries like Britain and the Netherlands interested in the concept.
Two new business books are in the works and some ideas are being sketched out for a few fiction books and plans for more property investment and renovations will certainly keep the family busy but carving out time to spend together as a family will always be the top priority.
“Most importantly I want to spend some quality time with my two girls. They are growing up too quickly and sometimes I feel I am missing out.”
