One of my favorite fortune cookie fortunes goes like this: “Many shall receive advice, but only the wise will profit by it.” This is relevant to all corporate improvement initiatives and especially anything labeled “Lean.”
The biggest mistake that most make when implementing any big system changes, be it lean product development, six sigma or open innovation, is not sufficiently planning for the cultural impact. These changes can be both physical and psychological. The reason they are often under-considered is a simple one — it’s too hard to deal with and filled with risks. But as we’ve experienced many times, it pays to sweat the soft stuff.
Many more companies are successful with lean manufacturing than they are with lean product development. A lot of this happens for the same reasons, mostly having to do with staff buy-in. If you have not convinced and sold the proposed procedural changes to those who must experience them, you will not go far. Manufacturing has it a bit easier as shop floor personnel are more used to and inclined to cooperate if given precise direction whereas engineering, R&D, marketing, etc., are staffed by those trained to challenge ideas and scrutinize intellectual pursuits.
When trying to implement Lean Product Development, in general, people will focus on the technical issues first, such as how to reorganize work, and if trying to stick to a Toyota-type approach, how to adapt and implement shop floor tools such as a Haejunka box. But tools are really the lowest hanging fruit of such pursuits. If you have not changed your culture to be one where the tools are accepted and uniformly followed, then you are basically doomed. And there are often A LOT of new tools to introduce. It’s not enough to change how you do things, you have to also change how things are done, otherwise, after the honeymoon, things will quickly revert to the old methods. Read more…
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In times of cerebral duress, I’ve often found myself yearning for the quiet dignity of manual labor. While jobs that are composed of repetitive tasks can quickly become boring (and are not often financially rewarding), there is a romantic appeal to clear task goals and more frequent senses of accomplishment. Activities of invention and creativity, such as marketing and engineering, offer tremendous intellectual freedom, but often at the price of a lack of direction or confidence that you are doing the right things.
If my company had a shop floor, I actually wouldn’t mind spending a couple of weeks every year running a workcell and spending my time trying to hit throughput goals. Is this just a case of the grass being greener? Consider the following book excerpt about a study done to determine what conditions create the right environment for job satisfaction:
“The types of activities which people all over the world consistently report as most rewarding…involve a clear objective, a need for concentration so intense that no attention is left over, a lack of interruptions and distractions, clear and immediate feedback on progress toward the objective, and a sense of challenge…”
[p. 65, Lean Thinking, Womack & Jones, Simon & Schuster 1996]*
The authors of this study say that when these work elements are achieved, it creates a type of psychological ‘flow’ where the worker becomes so absorbed as to lose self-consciousness and sense of time. In other words, “time flies when you’re having fun.” An appropriate sports analogy would be a player who gets “in the zone,” such as a pitcher working on a no-hitter or a basketball player who just can’t miss a shot. Athletes who seem in a constant zone like Michael Jordan often report a sense of surreal suspension or slowdown of time as a result of being into the ‘flow’ of the game. Read more…
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Don Reinertsen is the only person I know whose numbers always add up. It’s not that his math is higher quality than yours, but he is the only one I know that is disciplined enough to employ math consistently. In his work with us training people on Lean Product Development, participants (mostly engineers) often comment on the soundness of his material from a mathematical and statistical standpoint.
Don is well known for debunking myths from Six Sigma, Toyota Production System and other management schools of thought, simply by “doing the math.” Chances are if Don is involved in something, it’s because it has calculable value associated with it. He has applied this successfully and turned around many people’s opinions on what is a valuable activity and what is wasteful.
With that lens, I found it at least mildly surprising that Don is an active Tweeter. I’ll be honest, I don’t find much twitter activity worth the time. To fully understand tweets, you have to follow someone for some time and really pay attention to understand the necessary context. There is just so much noise about what was for lunch and how that movie made you remember the butterfly that got stuck in your peanut butter and jelly sandwich when you were 8 that I lose interest quickly.
But Don is someone I may choose to follow, if for nothing but the quick insights he occasionally posts like the one above from his feed.
Don’s MRT Workshop: Second Generation Lean Product Development: Applying the Principles of Flow
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The following “Reader Reactions” were originally published in The Critical Path email newsletter, December 15, 1998. Below is the large amount of reader feedback we got from our “Lean vs TOC” piece. To read the original article, click here.
Some of the letters below are followed by our comments in bold.
Dear Critical Path:
How would Taiichi Ohno feel about this?
I think Ohno would ask, “Does your output now match your customers requirements?” From a personnel response your example of 30 outside people is not typical of a TPS kaizen event. And so, from this atypical example a good point could be made by anyone… Goldratt could have chosen a more honest comparison. His point of focusing on bottleneck “Herbies” vs TPS Lean focusing on the value stream could have been made with a more honorable example.
As for comparing the two projects: What were the two projects?
The TPS project could be where they are trying to take out another person by improving the processes within a multi operation cell after a succession of previously successful improvement events. As compared to the TOC project where the team was looking at a high scrap, high labor, high overtime, high backlog, very problematic area with much more opportunity for improvement than the TPS project.
Or, in other words the TOC project had a lot of “low hanging fruit” as compared with the TPS project reaching high for their improvement. Maybe the TPS project was breaking paradigms while the TOC project was solving problems.
In conclusion, to imply that Toyota is not concerned with bottlenecks is false. They are, they just call it takt time. I for one like what both the TOC and the TPS systems have to offer and will use both ways of thinking to promote improvements.
Sincerely,
Bob Schroer
Wizard of WOW
Hi-Stat Manufacturing Read more…
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This article was originally published in The Critical Path email newsletter, December 15, 1998. We received several emails about this article when it was published which may be even more interesting than the original piece.
LEAN VS. TOC – GOLDRATT’S PERSPECTIVE
At Management Roundtable’s recent Metrics conference, I had the opportunity to participate in a special luncheon with Theory of Constraints guru, Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt. Having read both “The Goal” and “Lean Thinking,” I took the opportunity to ask Dr. Goldratt a question that I had been thinking about for some time:
“Dr. Goldratt,” I asked, “Can you compare and contrast TOC with Jim Womack’s “Lean Thinking” as it’s derived from the Toyota Production System?” Both philosophy ‘systems’ appear cast from the same mold, both are strategies that focus on value, both challenge ‘batch and queue’ conventional wisdom, and both are attempting to apply their shop floor principles to the overall enterprise, especially product development. Read more…
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Lean and I go way back and I consider us more like friends than acquaintances. How well do we know each other? In the early 1990s, Management Roundtable conducted a series of events called the “Manufacturing Leadership Summit.” We would gather top executives from numerous industries, mostly automotive and aerospace, who would come together as delegates in a congress of sorts to network and learn about how to make more money “making stuff” with tools such as target costing, MRPII, and yes, the Toyota Production System. The summits were limited to about 150 executives and were held in the amphitheater lecture hall at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Read more…
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One of my favorite fortune cookie fortunes goes like this: “Many shall receive advice, but only the wise will profit by it.” This is relevant to all corporate improvement initiatives and especially anything labeled “Lean.”
