Feb 22 2013
Why doesn’t Lean work? | A discussion started by Norman Bodek
Norman Bodek asked this provocative question on the TPS Principles and Practice discussion group on LinkedIn, and elaborated as follows:
“Lean is a total system of continuous improvement with everyone involved.
A few years back, I visited Toyota’s plant in Georgetown, Kentucky with the group of executives from various construction corporations. One member of our team asked Gary Convis, then president of Toyota, ” What do you expect from your workers?” Gary answered, “Only two things: come to work and pull the cord.”
Simple, but how many of you attempting to do Lean allow your employees to pull the cord, stop the line, and have everybody, literally everybody in the plant, wait until that one person resolves the problem. I would guess only 1% or less of you that are attempting to implement lean allow your workers to stop the line. Why?
Lean is a very powerful process that has allowed Toyota to grow from a company that made junk in 1952 to one of the largest most successful corporations in the world producing some of the highest quality automobiles available. And the essence of Lean is to empower every employee to become a problem solver, to make every employee self-reliant. But how do you do this? How can you begin to trust your employees that they will make the right decision for the company? I say “simple”, because if Toyota can do it so can you.
Yes, you are running your kaizen blitzes and they are wonderful. Yes, you are doing Six-Sigma and that is wonderful. Yes, you are doing value stream mapping and it is wonderful. Yes, you are doing 5S, setting up cellular manufacturing, doing TPM, Hoshin Kanri, and using many of the wonderful Toyota tools, but you are, for some strange reason, not empowering your employees to be self-reliant.
Toyota probably fearful to build plants in America, suggested to General Motors to set up a joint venture and Toyota would teach them how to use the Toyota production system and be able to transfer it to all General Motors plants. GM, laughingly, selected their worse plant in Fremont, California, NUMMI, and gave it to Toyota to run. One year later, NUMMI became the best plant in the GM system but GM never really learned how to implement properly in their other plants and GM went bankrupt.
I recently came back from Japan, my 81st trip, and was told that Toyota is still the best model to follow. I strongly recommend that you learn how to emulate them and get every single employee involved in continuous improvement. Find a way to let everyone in your company walk on two feet. But, I ask you, ‘How are you going to do it? How are you going to make lean work?'”
There have been 70 comments, as of today, from Sid Joynson, William Botha, Thomas Ligocki, Philip Marris, Anthony Mangione, Peter Winton, Carlos Hernández, and others. My own response was as follows:
Norman’s diagnosis that Lean isn’t working is correct if you are discussing what passes for Lean in the US, and it’s not just an impression. A few years ago, I did my own analysis, the results of which were published as a Viewpoint in Manufacturing Engineering in 2006 . I chose 40 winners of the Shingo Prize and searched Hoovers Online, for comparative performance data with their 400 top competitors. On the average, the data did not show that the Shingo Prize predicted any advantage in profitability, market share or employment growth.
Fundamentally, most Lean programs today are to serious implementations as cheap imitation shoes are to the training of Usain Bolt.
Norman, however, goes one level deeper when he says “Lean is a total system of continuous improvement with everyone involved,” which implies that the key to making Lean successful is to get everyone involved in continuous improvement, and I don’t think that is the case. Don’t get me wrong. It is no doubt a wonderful and useful thing. I just don’t see it as the key.
I find it always enlightening to compare the literature on Lean published in the US with what you find in Japan, which Norman is certainly familiar with, from having organized the translation of several classics in the 1980s. I have in my hands a newer book that I picked up on my last visit to Japan, that has not been translated yet. It is from 2009, by Mikiharu Aoki, a 25-year Toyota alumnus who became a consultant in 2004. The title means “The heart of introducing the Toyota Production System” (トヨタ生産方式導入の奥義), and it is heavily technical.
By contrast, the bulk of the American literature is shockingly light on technical content, which is dismissed as a tactical toolbox you shouldn’t worry about too much. Instead, the literature you should focus strategic issues like change management, motivating people, and calculating metrics.
Crispin Vincenti-Brown identified four dimensions to manufacturing:
- The engineering of production lines.
- Logistics and production control.
- Organization and people.
- Metrics and accountability.
In the US, the engineering dimension is ignored. Logistics receives some attention, but Lean programs are overwhelmingly focused on the last two: organization and metrics. It is out of balance, and I believe this is the reason these programs fail.
February 22, 2013 @ 11:36 am
Comment in the TPS Principles and Practice discussion group on LinkedIn:
February 22, 2013 @ 11:42 am
Comment in the TPS Principles and Practice discussion group on LinkedIn:
February 22, 2013 @ 11:43 am
I don’t know how the 40 did before, but the Shingo Prize is supposed to reward manufacturing excellence, not improvement from a bad starting point. I used the metrics of market share, profitability and employment growth for two reasons. First, I would expect a successful Lean implementation to improve all three; second, I had access to them.
Improving these metrics is not identified as a goal in the Shingo model, which is all about process compliance. I don’t know how long the 40 had been at it, but what they had accomplished was deemed good enough to warrant the Shingo Prize.
I think the first condition for success in Lean implementation is to do it for the right reasons, and process compliance is not it. Its pursuit makes plants look Lean, but it doesn’t make them Lean. The right motivation is the pursuit of concurrent improvement in all dimensions of performance: Quality, Delivery, Cost, Safety, Morale, all at the same time.
February 22, 2013 @ 1:41 pm
Comment in the TPS Principles and Practice discussion group on LinkedIn:
February 22, 2013 @ 1:45 pm
Comment in the TPS Principles and Practice discussion group on LinkedIn:
February 22, 2013 @ 1:47 pm
You wrote “Lean being defined in its original Toyota form as: Providing what the customer wants, in the quantity they want, when they want it.”
Is that it? It sounds like Business 101, rather than the result of the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people over 75 years, and more if you include the concepts from Toyoda’s loom business.
In 2013, considering the state of the Japanese economy, and its electronics industry in particular, Matsushita’s 1979 pronouncement sounds like hubris.
When quoting people, I also think we should consider their deeds as well as their words. As I recall, Jack Welch was the pioneer of the rank-and-yank system at GE, which turned the review system into a game of musical chairs, with the “bottom” 10% systematically fired.
TPS is not reducible to a set of attitudes. With the right attitudes but without proper technical and managerial skills, your organization can enthusiastically fall off a cliff.
February 22, 2013 @ 1:49 pm
Comment in the TPS Principles and Practice discussion group on LinkedIn:
February 22, 2013 @ 1:50 pm
Sakichi Toyoda did not leave behind a book explaining his philosophy, so we have to go by what he did. If all he cared about was “to give the customer what they want, in the quantity when they want it,” why did he spend his life improving loom technology? If you had conducted focus groups of loom users in Japan in 1895, do you think they would have said they wanted automatic shuttle changes and automatic stoppage in case of weft breakage?
In addition, the way he went about improving loom technology left another legacy: the incremental automation approach known as Jidoka, later described by Ohno as the second pillar of TPS, on an equal footing with JIT.
You are saying that the details of TPS tools and techniques are widely known. Where? By whom? How many manufacturing managers or engineers do you know who understand heijunka, cell design, work-combination charts, the proper use of andons, or wage systems to support Lean?
Most lists of “Lean tools” do not even mention these tools. All you see is VSM which, to say the least is minor in TPS, kaizen events that not even part of it, and 5S, which is mistakenly presented as easy to implement.
When I was in Japan in 1980, organizing factory tours, what we saw and its impact on foreign visitors made my colleagues and me pessimistic about the feasibility of competing with it. The only hope we could find was in the overconfidence of the Japanese managers we met, and your Matsushita quote is a perfect example of it. My condolences for the British electronics industry, but who would have thought then that Nissan would end up controlled by Renault?
Regarding Jack Welch, I think that words that are in contradiction with deeds on the same topic are disqualifiers. Henry Ford had some good bits on assembly line concepts. He was also a Nazi sympathizer, which showed poor judgment on people issues and disqualified him on that topic. In the following picture, you see him receiving the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in July, 1938.
It is SO untrue that “most people know the methodology and technology of TPS.” The distance between what is common knowledge and what is needed for successful implementation is like that between playing chopsticks on the piano and Chopin in concert.
February 22, 2013 @ 1:51 pm
In my last comment, I was responding point by point to Sid’s last post, not to the original question, to which I had responded in my first comment in this thread.
People who get involved with Lean, whether as employees of companies that implement it or as consultants, come from a variety of backgrounds. Few are engineers. You see MBAs, psychologists, marketing people, and the occasional cognitive sociologist and defrocked priest. There is nothing wrong with having all these different perspectives, as long as they don’t turn into the six blind men with the elephant, but they often do.
The psychologist takes engineering for granted while the engineer does the same for organization and people issues and the production control manager thinks that everything revolves around planning and scheduling….
The truth is that you can’t have a successful implementation unless you address, in the right sequence, engineering, production control/logistics, organization and people, and metrics. You can’t really expect anyone to master all of these, but you need a team that does, and where every member understands that his or her perspective is not the whole picture.
February 22, 2013 @ 1:54 pm
Comment in the TPS Principles and Practice discussion group on LinkedIn:
February 22, 2013 @ 1:55 pm
“The next process is the customer” is a metaphor from TQC that I think is overused. Real customers pay and have the option to buy from another supplier; the operator of the next station on the line doesn’t pay and cannot get your output from another source.
“The next process is the customer” truly means “Treat the next process as if it were a customer.” Using this metaphor may be useful in influencing attitudes, but we should never forget the difference. Otherwise, we could have a business where everybody looks after “customers” but it goes bankrupt for lack of customers who actually pay.
The exclusive emphasis on customers is also misleading. I remember managers who couldn’t see the value of heijunka, because it has to do with making life easier for suppliers, while all they thought they should care about was “customer experience.”
If a computer ordered on line has a 5-day delivery lead time, the customer does not care when the assembly of this computer is scheduled within a 2-hour window. It does not affect customer experience. On the other hand, heijunka sequencing within the 2-hour window makes a difference in the kitting lines that feed assembly. They didn’t care, because, to them, the kitting lines were just a supplier, and just expected to provide whatever they were asked for.
February 22, 2013 @ 2:03 pm
Comment in the TPS Principles and Practice discussion group on LinkedIn:
February 22, 2013 @ 2:24 pm
I am sure you know Sid better than I do, but I am just going by his words, and I am sure he can speak for himself if I misunderstood him.
Your account of jidoka is all about the detection of thread breakage. But equally important were the transitions from manual to powered looms and automatic shuttle change. Draper in the US had been trying to automatically change bobbins within shuttles while the shuttles moved, which sounds extraordinarily difficult. One idea of Sakichi Toyoda was to switch whole shuttles rather than bobbins, which was much easier and was a key feature of his Type G loom.
If Toyota’s jidoka is “automation with a human touch,” we must not forget that it is an approach to automation. Preparing shuttles while the loom is running also sounds like a precursor to methods used in SMED.
But you seem to agree that Jidoka is different from JIT and that TPS needs both. Sid was presenting Lean is identical to JIT, with Jidoka left out.
February 23, 2013 @ 6:02 pm
My observations are that lean or whatever you want call it is a system that has both human and technical components. Many management people don’t understand how work gets done or doesn’t get done, period, some basic industrial engineering concepts and visual management techniques. They certainly don’t understand the power of lean systems to provide important feedback on processes. Yes, there is a cultural component to this, but the main obstacles seem to be a lack of curiosity, interest and willingness to really experiment or employ the scientific method. I would say that these elements constitute major impediments to progress. Another hypothesis that I am contemplating is that working with lean concepts taxes both sides of our brain and this is difficult for most people. Having team members who can work in all of these areas, both technical and human, certainly can help, but everyone has to understand the basic elements of the system.
February 25, 2013 @ 9:31 am
Comment in the TPS Principles and Practice discussion group on LinkedIn:
February 25, 2013 @ 9:37 am
Comment in the TPS Principles and Practice discussion group on LinkedIn:
February 25, 2013 @ 9:40 am
Comment in the TPS Principles and Practice discussion group on LinkedIn:
February 25, 2013 @ 9:42 am
As you know, I admire the work you did at Injex and yes, each component of the production system was simple, like all the components of a rocket are simple, but the system as a whole was anything but.
Your door panel assembly cells looked simple, but producing and delivering just in sequence a million door panels to NUMMI without a single defective is not an achievement anyone would describe as simple. It took you 20 years to get there.
Any tool or method that is used by people has to be both simple enough to be understood by its users and sophisticated enough to work. When you see TPS working, it looks simple and is easily underestimated.
Toyota’s Global Body Line (GBL) is designed to support both robotic welding in high volume and manual welding in low volume. It is an idea anyone can understand. How do you make that work? You need fixtures that hold the body parts from the inside, which required an improvement in stamping accuracy…
February 25, 2013 @ 9:47 am
Comment in the TPS Principles and Practice discussion group on LinkedIn:
February 25, 2013 @ 9:48 am
Jidoka is actually an untranslatable pun, because the Toyota version is pronounced exactly like the standard word for automation, but written with a slightly different Kanji in the middle. The Toyota version is 自働化, literally “transformation into something that WORKS by itself”; the standard version is 自動化 or “transformation into something that MOVES by itself.” Autonomation is an OK approximation of this nuance, but automation with a human touch is still automation. It results in machines doing more of the work and people doing less of it, and it changes the nature of the work people do.
I would like to read your 1981 introduction to TPS. If you send it to me, I will happily send you one of my books in exchange, if you are interested.
There is a rich literature on the technical and managerial content of TPS in Japanese, but not in English. Norman Bodek deserves great credit for getting a few classics translated. Last time I checked at the large bookstore across from the train station in Kitakyushu, there were several hundred titles on a whole host of manufacturing topics. In the US, the few books that exist on these topics do not sell well, as you can see by checking their Amazon rankings.
All the peopleology in the world cannot compensate for not knowing the technical content, and vice versa.
The expression “the good bits” is an understatement, borrowed from you. The term “mass production” was coined to designate the Ford system, so it is hardly surprising that Henry Ford should be viewed as its father. There were plenty of people in the 1930s who saw quite clearly who the Nazis were. Winston Churchill for example? If Henry Ford’s fondness for Nazis does not disqualify him on people issues, I wonder what would.
To speak positively, I value people who do what they say, particularly when they make recommendations to others.
As for the last paragraph, it says nothing about me.
January 20, 2014 @ 7:23 am
Have you ever worked on the shop floor and asked anybody how they felt about lean? Lean ruins companies, causes very bad morale, makes employees work a lot harder for the same pay. Making everything standard sounds good if we were all robots what’s easy for you might not be easy for me standard doesn’t work period.
January 20, 2014 @ 11:13 am
It seems you have had a bad experience with L.A.M.E. (“Lean As Mistakenly Implemented”) rather than Lean. There is more to Lean than standards, and doing the same task the same way every time is a requirement of all manufacturing, Lean or not.
January 20, 2014 @ 1:34 pm
Lean production is not new it is the cutting edge of capitalism today. The heart of lean production is re organizing work to cut cost. Management says it wants workers input, what their really looking for is more output! “TO get more work out of fewer people” from management’s point of view lean production is eliminating waste, getting rid of “excess” activities, materials, and workers. The only problem is, their definition of “waste” includes most things that make work life bearable, like breaks, or a reasonable pace, or a set work schedule, or decent paycheck, or job security. To get the greatest bang for the buck lean production stresses workers to the limits of their capacities through. .._speed-up, plain and simple – just work faster, or do more jobs, or do the same with fewer people.#2 DeSkilling – break the jobs down so they take little time to learn. This saves money because higher paid skilled workers can be replaced with lower paid unskilled workers. #3 Multi – skill ing – really multi-tasking. Doing more jobs, usually of the unskilled variety. 4 Contracting out or privatization of work previously done by unionize workers.#5 use of temporaries, part timers and contract workers.#6 more flexibility for management in setting hours and tasks.#7 cracking down on absenteeism and eliminating replacements for people who are absent or retired. THAT’S definitely not a morale booster.
January 21, 2014 @ 9:56 am
Where exactly are you getting your information?
Just about every statement you make contradicts what I have seen in factories that truly implement Lean, and is certainly not consistent with the recommendations I make to clients.
Lean Manufacturing is a departure from the previous model, Mass Production, and it is not about cutting costs but about building organizations that can be competitive in the long run. You may get a short term boost out of “just making people work faster,” but it does not build for the next ten years. Instead, it creates high employee turnover and an organization that is unable to improve.
Hand-carrying a car battery 30 feet every minute from a pallet to a car, as is common in mass production plants, is not an activity that makes “work life bearable.” Instead, it is a genuine waste of human effort, that is eliminated by presenting the battery to the operator 3 feet away from the car. This is the sort of improvement that Lean is about, not “stressing workers to the limits of their capacities” but working at a steady, sustainable pace.
Breaks were introduced into the work day about 100 years ago, not to make life more pleasant but because they enhanced overall productivity. Lean does not eliminate breaks.
“Breaking the jobs down so they take little time to learn” is not Lean but basic division of labor thinking from 250 years ago and industrial engineering from 100 years ago. The Lean approach is to enrich the jobs and rotate operators so that they develop more skills and become more valuable resources. An operator who has been doing the same work at the same station for 15 years is more vulnerable to changes than one who has been given the opportunity to learn 10 different jobs.
The outsourcers are the executives who said “We’ll skip Lean and go straight to China”; the Lean implementers, instead, are working to maintain and expand local jobs.
The use of temps, within reason, is a legitimate way to provide some flexibility in the amount of labor needed while providing job security for permanent employees. You don’t want to have a majority of temps, for the same reason you don’t want employee turnover.
In Lean operator teams, the leader is one who knows all the jobs performed by the team and has a lighter routine work load than the other team members, so that he can give them a hand as needed.
January 5, 2015 @ 12:30 pm
I am in total agreement. I Can’t Count The Companies I’ve Seen Doing this, Overworking Staff Constant Overtime Every Single Order Is A Fire Drill Because Of The We Don’t Make It Until You Order it. I’ve said no thank you to many of these companies when seeking work and moved on to a better one high turnover and employees who are only there because they have to pay the bills and hate their jobs is what you will get
January 21, 2014 @ 8:07 pm
I got my information from a website called solidarity.com everything it says is one hundred percent accurate. At least at my job maybe you should come and teach them the proper way cause they are failing miserably. I have answered several questions for you now I’m curious have you worked on a shop floor before or have you always been office or management or a consultant. And if you have worked on the shop floor how long ago was it. The reason I ask is lean means something different to shop employees then management or consultants of lean everybody that teaches lean seems to be blind about what its really doing to the shop employees or grunts which is what management thinks of us as. Ever thing I put in my last post is happening at my job. These plants that you visited are they in the us and if so name some of them so I can talk to some of the shop employees and ask them how lean is treating them how much more work there doing. And if they are now worried about their jobs because of it. Just because you move a production line closer together doesn’t necessarily make it easier for the employees. In my case the line is to close now ever body runs into each other not enough space and it doesn’t make things faster it’s just a cluster lean sounds good on paper but in reality it’s hurting the company
January 21, 2014 @ 9:52 pm
This is your third comment, and the first in which you say anything about your personal experience. By comparison, I am an open book. If you want to know about me, you can start with the About page of this blog. Regarding my current work, you can check out Using videos to improve operations | Part 7. It is about a joint project with my partners in Spain where we were looking for — and found — ways for assembly operators in an auto parts plant to work at a more sustainable pace while keeping up with demand.
I understand this is not the sort of thing that is happening where you work, and you have my sympathy. I would love to help, but I go where I am invited, and the invitations come from management. I understand that you feel your managers have no respect for you. I don’t know them, but I am willing to bet that many of them are simply afraid of the shop floor. the fact is that you have to face its music if you want to do anything in manufacturing, as effective managers, and consultants, do.
There is more to designing a production line than laying out the equipment. You also have to work with operators to design the jobs and choreograph them so that they don’t interfere with each other. This is the object of what is known as Standard Work,” a name I don’t particularly like because it’s not descriptive.
January 22, 2014 @ 9:38 am
Thanks I’ll look into that. I just want you to know that this is not just experience everybody in the shop feel the same way. Have a great day!!
April 24, 2015 @ 7:58 am
I currently work in a LEAN environment which has also now implemented Lean Management System. It is the worst possible environment i have ever worked in. Team morale has tanked and we are asked to submit continuous improvement ideas constantly but do the same amount of work. Turnover has increased and we cannot retain Talent. For what it’s worth, my company is not a manufacturing business. NEVER EVER apply these fundamentals to a customer service business. I am watching my company unravel daily due to your beloved LEAN. (Lousy Example of Aimless Necessities)
October 5, 2016 @ 9:34 pm
This thread is quite amazing to me. I’m a bottom line driven engineer and will embrace anything that translates to getting the work done and adding to the profit. I would say my frame work of thinking seems straight forward to me.
Customers pay for my goods so they must be kept happy, recalls and defects are bad no matter how you view them and people are inherently good, honest and keen to do their best. These points are mentioned here and yet are not absolute indicators of Lean or other methodologies actually working. So really what is the point of them all?
Managing people properly seems all that is needed to me. That includes listening and engaging them with straight forward talking. Employing people and putting them into a production environment will give you feedback every day if you talk to them. If items are not to hand at the right time they will tell you, if you talk to them like people; that is respectfully. I can’t see any situation where this wouldn’t work.
Treat them disrespectfully and never talk to them and you have much more than Lean, 5S, 8D, Fishbone etc. to worry about. My belief is train and retain, simple.
I recently had an interview at a very high profile Tier-1 automotive supplier that has TPS in its veins. 3 hours I sat through mantras of reporting this and that, 5S, A3 and goodness knows what else. After which a tour was done and one machine had spent all night with its fancy robots making rejected product and no one knew.
I asked don’t you QC and the answer was yes at shift changeover. Seriously I could not believe my ears, a night’s production scrapped. If you look at it statistically what are the chances of me walking into that company that has been around 20 years and seeing that kind of reject level?
You could be right in thinking it happens quite a lot and watching the machines run I’m guessing it did, lots of little things were wrong.
And no the equipment was not old junk, it was top quality and modern. Just maybe if they had got engaged and were encouraged to do their actual job things would be better; it’s a possibility.
I come from a place untouched by these named methodologies and in a year we would typically have 2 customer complaints from a total of around 360 million units made and around 6 in-house product holds of small numbers made over 3 to 4 hours maximum which would be 8 to 16 thousand units.
I’m not saying these techniques have no merit but they appear to be adopted as a one size fits all and as an alternative to good managerial practices. And can I ask why recalls cannot be a KPI of all these methodologies, from January 1992 to December 2005 there were 47 UK recalls for Toyota and from January 2006 to August 2016 there were 521.
If I was following a system that showed these results, and bear in mind these are only the really serious reportable safety recalls, I would be looking for another system pretty sharp.
I have read plenty about it so what is it about Lean that I am missing, because all I see in this thread is excuses for why it doesn’t work when it should, plus the full on negativity to it which I don’t buy either.
Although I must concur with some comments in that I have Nevers seen a Lean place that is also a happy one, but for all I know there may be one out there.
August 16, 2018 @ 9:27 pm
Interesting to me is the fact that most all “lean Manufacturing” companies and consultants in the states rarely discuss the most important part of lean. Forget all the hype about 5S and learning all the Japanese pet names for all the tools, unless your trying to impress the business owner that you know something that they need to know. Elimination of waste in all processes should be the focus because that is the theory behind Lean. You can practice 5S or implement kanban or have regular kaizan events but if you fail to focus on waste, you will fail. As to the topic of employee empowerment, that is the best way to create waste in your processes. Employee empowerment is important however it cannot be allowed to be without thought and guidance. As a process engineer I designed a hybrid cell if you will that did allow for line stoppage by any member of the process, necessary as described in the process engineering literature for my process. I had to learn every position in my process and find the kinks in order to ensure the manufacturing employee could do the job efficiently and effectively. After working through 15 kaizan events at the cost of approximately $70000.00 for 5 days, we saw every event reversed in 2 weeks after the event ended. That’s wasteful! We took a different approach. I was given a manufacturing cell making gearboxes designed with lean in mind. The company I worked for serious tried but could only produce 12 gearboxes per day. Traditional gearbox lines were producing at least triple the rate of my cell. I transformed my process to simplify assembly and have more hands involved in the manufacture of every gearbox. I took about a month designing my process and at the end of shift on a Friday when everyone went home, I moved out the old assembly process and installed my new design. On Monday I spent about an hour with all my process members to run through how it would work. We produced 30 gearboxes on the very first day. this continued until I left the company 43 days later. One year passed and my old company asked me to consider coming back and returning to my cell. they revealed to me that my cell remained at 30+ gearboxes even after I left. this was the first and only kaizan event that held in that company. Now the important part was the elimination of “Grey Matter” which give the employee the empowerment needed to improve the quality of throughput without having to create a solution. The process design ensured that all things in the process were considered and the employee merely needed to recognize the issue and initiate a corrective action thus further eliminating waste in the process.
Now for my final thought, due to the fact that I do not possess a college degree, my position with this company was terminated even though I had nearly tripled throughput from my cell. My documentation was cleaned from my computer without ever being looked at making it impossible to complete my plan of improvement. When I was asked to return a year later, I was shocked that my numbers stayed at 30 units per day. Had they explored my file and followed my plan, they could have implemented without me and doubled the throughput of the entire gearbox division. That would have generated around 24 million addition dollars at the time for the company.
Lean doesn’t work in this country not because its not a good idea, but because emphasis is placed too high on education and not high enough on people.
April 17, 2024 @ 5:47 am
I stumbled across this blog while doing an internet search about JIT/Lean. I was gob smacked by your factoid that the 40 winners of the Shingo Prize showed no correlation to increased revenue, market share, or employment growth. I have a theory that JIT/Lean is much less effective in America due to 3 cultural reasons.
1. Japanese firms rarely lay off workers. As a result of the normal ebbs and flows of business, there is likely more time for workers to explore incremental improvements.
2. Also related to the lack of layoffs, there is a giri (I learned or mis-learned as ‘on’) on the part of the workers for the pay they receive during these lulls resulting in their desire to ‘give back’ to the company in the form of process and technological improvement.
3. There are centuries, maybe millennia of Japanese cultural focus on process. Think of martial arts, the tea ceremony, calligraphy, wood joining…all practices that are endlessly repeated, seeking but never finding true perfection.
Americans are much more project oriented; and we are very good at it! Think Manhattan Project, Apollo 11, Hoover Dam, and other examples where America is world class leaders. I don’t have to elaborate on American corporations’ layoffs.
I believe these underlying cultural aspects make Japan a perfect fit for JIT/Lean while it is a more difficult fit for American companies.
What are your thoughts?
April 17, 2024 @ 10:48 am
National culture is irrelevant! If it were, Toyota would not be able to successfully operate plants in the US or France.