Apr 7 2013
The Truth about Lean Failures | Vivek Naik
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
The truth is, most lean implementations are a failure over long duration.Some of them are the major causes, as identified by the people involved in the implementation. They may be the right or maybe these are just the symptoms.
In this post, Vivek Naik presents the results of a survey about the causes of Lean implementation failures conducted among the readers of his blog.
The respondents, of course, are not representative of anything except a self-selected subgroup of followers of a blog on Lean, but Naik, to his credit, asked open-ended essay questions like:
- What is your Biggest problem to implement lean in your organisation?
- What would help you overcome this challenges?
And he didn’t tally percentages of responses, which would not have been meaningful. What he does is simply list and categorize the causes that the respondents have put forward.
What I find striking in this list is that no one mentioned insufficient mastery of the engineering and management tools of Lean. ‘Lack of understanding” appears only under Culture. What about the ability to achieve SMED, generate heijunka schedules, or design a bonus system that supports improvement without turning employees into bounty hunters?
Along with the majority of Lean implementers in the US, Naik’s responders take the tools for granted. In that attitude, I see a major cause of Lean failures.
See on viveknaik.net
May 5 2013
Big Data – The Antithesis of Lean Thinking | Bill Waddell
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“It’s too bad lean thinking is free. I suppose that’s not entirely true; a lean transformation actually costs a few bucks for the learning – consultants, books and training. But it is nothing like the cost of an ERP system, and it pales in comparison to ERP thinking on steroids – ‘Big Data’. Because the ERP and Big Data providers play in such a high dollar arena they can and do spend a lot on very focused marketing efforts. IBM, a company that stands to gain quite a bit from Big Data becoming the focus of business management, is providing “software, curriculum, case studies—including guest speakers” to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Fordham, Yale and about 300 other schools. Too bad those schools aren’t cranking out kids steeped in lean thinking, but there is no one who stands to make a enough money from peddling lean in a position to buy college curriculums on such a scale…”
While I concur with Bill on the irrelevance of “Big Data” in manufacturing, I can’t follow him when he says it is a “singularly bad idea” for business in general.
Big Data, per se, is actually not an idea but a phenomenon experienced in companies like Google, Amazon, eBay, Netflix, and others that process clicks, queries and transactions from millions of users, and generatie Terabytes of data every day. This is what Big Data is. Making sense of it is vital to these companies, and its volume requires special technology.
Even in a large manufacturing company, specs, orders, production status and history, quality problem reports, etc., add up to Gibabytes of data in total, not Terabytes every day. While it is beyond what you can handle on an Excel spreadsheet, it does not qualify as Big Data and does not require the special technology that ecommerce companies have developed.
I also agree that the hot dog example from the HBR blog is simplistic. To give a less trivial example, assume you are in the business of providing streaming videos, and you discover from your customer data that those who view “Tora, Tora, Tora” also tend to view “The Bridges of Madison County.” That is unexpected and you wonder why. Then you find out that the customers who view both are married couples, form which you infer that the wife demands a chick flick for every aircraft-carrier movie…
This is a made-up example, but Ed Frazelle, in Supply Chain Strategy, quotes a real one about on-line ordering patterns for clothing. What kind of garments do customers tend to order together? I have asked that question around, and never met anyone who came up with the right answer, although, once you know it, it makes perfect sense: they order the same garment, in the same size, in different colors. And it is good to know if you are in charge of order picking.
See on www.idatix.com
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By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 0 • Tags: bigdata, eBay, Enterprise resource planning, IBM, Lean manufacturing, Netflix, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Terabyte