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Editorial: Leaning into the Future - Lean manufacturing Article
The article entitled: "Editorial: Leaning into the Future" is in the Lean manufacturing Articles section of Operations Management Papers area...
ARTICLE DESCRIPTION: As Editor I have to tell you that we have received more articles and information than we had pages for this issue. Great news! However, this meant cutting back on some content, so watch out for the next edition which will have my latest letter and lots more interesting stuff!
MORE INFO: Editorial: Leaning into the Future As Editor I have to tell you that we have received more articles and information than we had pages for this issue. Great news! However, this meant cutting back on some content, so watch out for the next edition which will have my latest letter and lots more interesting stuff! Leaning into the Future Lean has come a long way since it was ‘rediscovered’ in the West in the early 1980’s by Richard Schonberger (“Japanese Manufacturing Techniques”, 1982), and Robert Hall (“Zero Inventories”, 1983), and codified by Womack and Jones (“Lean Thinking”, 1996). Lean has become ‘mainstream’ in operations. Devoting a chapter in an operations management text, or a lecture in an MBA programme on Lean is increasingly inappropriate. Lean is now so well established in the automotive sector that it is difficult to find an organisation that does not have a Lean programme. In the UK, Industry Forum has undertaken hundreds of Kaizen events, initially in automotive but then in aerospace, metals, ceramics, and other sectors. The various Manufacturing Advisory Services (MAS) have together done scores of interventions in SMEs. Value stream maps, which are appearing almost everywhere, are giving new insights into opportunities for flow. Today, Lean has strong presence in retail and distribution, construction, and healthcare and Lean in the service sector is opening up. The first Lean Service Summit was held recently in Amsterdam, and Cardiff Business School started the world’s first MSc degree in Lean Operations in 1999, taught at factory sites. Yet, despite all this many misconceptions remain. To mention a few: Lean is a collection of tools. (It is not, it is a system). The main focus of Lean is waste elimination. (At best, waste is but one of three: Muda, Muri, Mura. Waste prevention should enjoy equal status). Lean is about inventory reduction. (The focus should be on the customer, time reduction and flow; if this means adding strategic inventory, so be it). Lean means Kanban. (Far better to think how to move ever closer towards final customer pull). You need policy deployment to do Lean. (Maybe. But remember that bad concepts can also be deployed). In operations, there is a steady trend towards the merging of Lean concepts with Theory of Constraints and with Six Sigma. Lean focuses on flow, value and waste, TOC on the identification and management of constraints, and Six Sigma on the reduction of variation and the resolution of persistent problems. All three share the initial starting point of the customer. All three are about improvement. The integration is necessary for a ‘systems view’. Some otherwise excellent guides such as Rother and Shook’s “Learning to See” make little or no mention of capacity, diverging or converging value streams, or variation. If only the world was as simple as Acme Stamping! Lean is also expanding laterally with expanding interest in Lean Accounting. Brian Maskell’s ideas include a new look at, and integration of, costing, measures, transaction simplification, and target costing. This much-needed work is relevant to supporting flow, to attacking overhead waste and speeding up the reporting process, but also to better outsourcing and foreign investment decisions. In service, Professor Roger Schmenner has pointed out that many of the world’s best service companies are pursuing ‘swift, even, flow’; in short, Lean. Subway rather than McDonald’s. John Seddon of Vanguard is the pioneer of the powerful concept of the distinction between value demand (basic first-time demand) and failure demand (that results from a failure to do something right or of not doing something). This is not the older idea of the cost of failure, nor is it just waste identification. It is asking about how much of the demand that comes into an organisation should not be there in the first place. It is about eliminating the feedback loop that generates ever more demand whilst inappropriately trying to standardise failure demand. Without this insight many call centres, field service operations, and other customer-contact organisations are almost certainly way oversized. And what of ‘Agile’? It remains a vague concept, sometimes implying extra inventory, extra capacity, or post-ponement. Yet these are ideas well established in the Lean world when appropriate – even Toyota’s inventory turns have steadily declined. (A lesson from TOC – a repositioning of inventory may be required to improve throughput.) But ‘agility’ is nevertheless a goal worth pursuing. The great danger is that ‘adopting agile’ becomes an excuse for not pursuing reductions in time and variation, whilst improving flow. Lean must never become complacent. Holweg and Pils, in “The Second Century”, have pointed out the considerable opportunities that remain in supply chains. It has been said that Toyota is 50 years into a 100-year Lean journey. And Karl Popper says there are only two types of theory: those that have been proven to be wrong, and those that are yet to be proven wrong. Of course, he was not talking about throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but about learning. Like Ohno, never cease to ask ‘why?’ John Bicheno Cardiff Business School Author of “The New Lean Toolbox”
PUBLISHER: Institute of Operations Management
Page number: 4 Word count: 700
Vol 30 - No 07 - November 2004
The article can be downloaded in full from the publisher's site i.e. the Institute of Operations Management.
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