Jan 11 2012
Certification, shmertification!
Several of the comments on Six Sigma R.I.P. touched on certification. With the belt system, this issue is of course central to Six Sigma, and, with Six Sigma on the Lean bandwagon, is merging with that of Lean certification, as evidenced in plant Lean champions who introduce themselves as Black Belts.
In his comment, R. Kester said the following:
Certification is the accepted way to communicate to others that you have successfully studied and can apply the concepts and tools of your profession (CPA, MD, RN, PE, etc.).
It is true that you want a Certified Public Accountant to help with your taxes, and that, if you go to a clinic, you don’t want anyone to mess with your health who doesn’t have the proper credentials posted on the wall. On the other hand, if you buy a painting, you usually don’t care whether the artist learned the craft in a school of fine arts or by spraying city walls: the paintings tell you all you need to know. There are also fields where certification exists but is not necessarily sought by all. For example, many university engineering departments seek ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) certification, but some don’t, such as Electrical Engineering at MIT, UC Berkeley, or Stanford. Their own brands are more prestigious and better known than ABET.
In the continuum of certifiable human activities, where does Lean sit between MDs and CPAs on one side and artists on the other? Lean experts sell their services to businesses, not consumers, and the primary use of certification is as a job applicant filter. To a recruiter with no personal knowledge of Lean and 100 resumes to review, the absence of a Lean certification is quick way to dispose of 80%. But what guarantee does the Lean certification give that the surviving 20% are the best candidates?
For a certification process to achieve this result, there has to be a consensus on a body of knowledge (BOK) and on institutions qualified to certify proficiency in its application. Having doubled life expectancy in 200 years, modern medicine is a credible BOK. We know its theories are sound because they prevent, cure or control many diseases. Tax law is different, in that it is a set of rules defined by people for people to follow, like the rules of poker. Outside of a specific human society, there is no corresponding physical reality. The difference between the two was dramatized in the library scene in The Day After Tomorrow: the coming of a new ice age had made the tax code fit for burning, but medicine had retained its relevance, as seen when the heroes used a medical book to save one their own (See Figure 1.).
Figure 1. Burning the tax code to survive in a new ice age
In that it affects the physical reality of factories, Lean is more like medicine than tax law. However, besides the absence of consensus on a BOK, Lean manufacturing differs from medicine is in the role of institutions, and academia in particular. Most medical discoveries are made in university medical schools; nearly all breakthroughs in manufacturing, on the other hand, have been made by self-taught practitioners in factories, with no academic affiliation. I am thinking of high school graduates like Taiichi Ohno, Frank Gilbreth, Charles Sorensen, or Frederick Taylor. Whatever consensus eventually emerges on a Lean BOK, it will not have come from universities. This leaves professional societies and for-profit training companies, and no answer to the question of who certifies the certifiers.
By requiring certifications, company recruiters are making them valuable to applicants, and are generating business both for genuine training organizations and for diploma mills. However, what these recruiters are not doing is their job, because the next Taiichi Ohno won’t make it past their initial review.
Jan 17 2012
Manufacturing and Wealth
When you are engaged in an activity, it is easy to endow it in your mind with qualities an outsider would not see. Manufacturing produces tangible, physical goods, things that you can see, touch, use, and express your social status with. It is a necessary sector of the world economy and, as manufacturing professionals, we have the privilege of working in it. But we have no grounds to claim that it is the only true way to create wealth.
What is wealth, anyway? To accountants, it is the difference between the totals of what you own and what you owe, synonymous with net worth; it is expressed in money and easily quantified. To others, it is how long you could survive if all your sources of income dried up, and expressed in time, however it might be measured. To others yet, it is related to human relations and happiness.
In none of these meanings does it make sense to assert that the production of material goods is the only source of wealth. This leaves out movie making, health care, tourism, or software development, just to name a few activities that generate wealth for many. As much as I personally like manufacturing, reality is that converting materials into products is only one of many ways of getting other people to pay. Making things is necessary, and somebody needs to do it. But immaterial goods or services are equally valuable creations, that can be exchanged for material goods.
18th century physiocrats thought that agriculture was the only true wealth creation. They were deluded because agriculture was the dominant sector of the economy of their day. Just because manufacturing was dominant for, say, 150 years doesn’t mean that sector has special virtues. In advanced economies, I see it headed in the same direction as agriculture : a vital and important sector, but employing a small, highly skilled fraction of the work force. It has been moving slowly and steadily in this direction since 1960, and I don’t think it can be reversed, no matter what politicians may say.
On the other hand, the human and social consequences can be anticipated. A production operator with 15 years of experience on the same machine is vulnerable; a multi-skilled machinist is much more likely to be retained and to find a rewarding alternative job if necessary. Schools can train young people wishing to make a career in manufacturing to meet the rising requirements.
Like agriculture, manufacturing matters because we need the goods, not because it provides jobs. Whether we make the goods or buy them is a decision that should not be based on direct labor cost alone but instead on all the relevant issues, including engineering, quality, logistics, intellectual property, the skills base, customer communications, public relations, taxes, etc.
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By Michel Baudin • Management 8 • Tags: Management, Manufacturing