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River Rouge Coke Ovens 1946-1976

Nov 8 2011

Factory life with and without Kaizen

In Kaizen, Masaaki Imai describes Japanese executives returning in the 1970s to American plants they had visited thirty years before and being struck by the absence of change: they saw the same production lines with the same equipment operated the same way. This started me looking for photographic evidence. Overall, pickings were slim, but I did find the above pictures of the same coke oven at the Ford River Rouge plant shot in 1946 and 1976.

If there is Kaizen activity in a factory, how does it change the work life of employees at all levels? The following chart compares the breakdowns of their use of time, with and without Kaizen:


In a plant without Kaizen, operators and supervisors are fully occupied with routine daily tasks: production for the operators, expediting parts, enforcing discipline, and record keeping for supervisors. Only middle managers and executives spend a fraction of their time on projects involving capacity changes, new production lines or new technology. Nobody works on incremental improvements to the way the work is done today.

By contrast, Kaizen involves employees at all levels  in such improvement activities to different degrees. Between improvement and daily routine, the boundary is sharp;  between improvement and innovation, fuzzy. Over time, the cumulative effect of incremental improvement is radical change by itself. In addition, the skills acquired and the lessons learned from incremental improvements are incorporated into new line or plant design projects. In some Japanese auto parts plants, I remember seeing automatic lines side-by-side, where one used old machines that had been gradually retrofitted with devices that reduced the need for human intervention, while the other one had been built from scratch with new machines to be automatic. The Kaizen work done to implement the former was essential to the success of the latter.

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By Michel Baudin • Management, Technology 10 • Tags: Continuous improvement, industrial engineering, Kaizen, Lean manufacturing, Manufacturing engineering

Nov 7 2011

IndustryWeek : Whether You are Talking Lean or Continuous Improvement, Problems are a Gold Mine

Problems are opportunities… A cliche made in the USA for a positive spin. I remember slides in the UK on which “Opportunities” had been switched back to “Problems” so that the audience would understand. But 2009 IW Best Plant winner Greatbatch has earned the right to use it.

Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

‘They are our opportunity to get better,’ says the director of lean enterprise at Greatbatch.
Via www.industryweek.com

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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings 0 • Tags: Lean manufacturing

Orgchart - end of lean program

Nov 4 2011

Should a lean transformation program ever end?

On LinkedIn, Patrick Courtney asked the following question: “In your experience, with a Lean transformation program when can the program become a waste? Is there a tipping point? Please share your experiences and wins.”

Let us assume we are talking about a successful Lean transformation with a program office, headed by a lean champion and including a small group of project facilitators. The question then is whether there is a point beyond which this organization is unnecessary.

That a Lean transformation is successful means that practices from daily operations on  the shop floor to strategic planning in the board room are more effective and efficient as a result of Lean, as evidence in business performance. At that point, people in the organization no longer refer to “Lean tools,” but simply to “the way we do things.” What was a change requiring adaptation is the new normal.

In principle, once Lean practices are assimilated into the company’s standard mode of operations, a program office is no longer necessary. In reality, there are some functions for which continued, organized support is necessary, such as the following:

  1. Continuous improvement. If continuous improvement is carried out through a system of circles or individual suggestions, then a structure will be needed to manage it and organize periodic conferences and award ceremonies.
  2. External certification. If the company is a part supplier, it may need to maintain its status as a “certified Lean” with some OEMs, and resources are needed to host audits and make sure that actions are taken as needed to ensure compliance.
  3. Supplier support. Companies that are successful at Lean commonly endeavor to pass their skills on to suppliers in exchange for price breaks, which requires a team of engineers.

Some people will remain involved with Lean, but in other roles than during the initial implementation, and often elsewhere on the organization chart. More generally, a successful change program should eventually fade away. For example, the pursuit of Total Quality Control (TQC) was a program in major Japanese manufacturing companies until the mid 1970’s, when all of them had received a Deming Prize. Then it  gradually lost visibility, as everything they had learned from this program was integrated in normal operations and its principles had become part of the culture.

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By Michel Baudin • Management 27 • Tags: Lean manufacturing, Management, Strategy

Nov 4 2011

Canadian survey: Lean for cost reduction doesn’t work

Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

After the consultants leave, savings quickly evaporate. Are you just putting your business on a fad diet?
Via www.canadianbusiness.com

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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings 0 • Tags: Lean manufacturing, Management, Strategy

Nov 3 2011

The UK’s Financial Times on exceptional companies, including Toyota

Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
It is a curious fact that in industry after industry there is at least one company that appears to succeed not by doing the same thing better than everyone else but by playing a completely different game.
Via www.ft.com

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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings 0 • Tags: Lean manufacturing, Management, Toyota

Toyota Type-G loom 1926

Nov 3 2011

How well do we know the history of Lean?

In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, the hero’s nemesis is an academic  who constantly lectures on historical details that he often gets wrong. Introductions to Lean, nowadays, often include a section on history, but no source is quoted, there are many inconsistencies with otherwise known facts, and some of the interpretations are confusing.

Manufacturing practices are like life forms. Some appear and go extinct, while others endure forever. Some 2-billion-year old fossils on the shore of Lake Superior match living organisms in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef today. Likewise, some of the oldest ideas on making things are still practiced today. Knowing who developed what techniques when and why is not just about giving credit. Not only does it occasionally make us rediscover a lost art, like TWI, but it also helps us understand its current relevance.

Getting the timeline right matters because of causality; causality, because it explains motivation; motivation, because it determines current relevance. People invent solutions because they have problems. If we are still facing the same problems, we can adopt or adapt their solutions. The people of Toyota found solutions to overcome crises throughout the life of the company, which eventually coalesced into a system, as explained by Takahiro Fujimoto. Their techniques are easiest to understand within their historical context.

The history of manufacturing is poorly documented. We know the exact wording of speeches made by Cicero in the Roman senate in 63 BCE, but we don’t know how the Romans made standard swords, spears,  helmets, and other weapons to sustain hundreds of thousands of legionnaires in the field (See Figure 1). Documenting how things were made has never been a priority of historians, and they rarely have the technical knowledge needed.

Figure 1. Cicero and a Roman soldier

Official histories are not to be trusted. School children throughout the world sit through classes where they hear an official account of history intended to create shared narratives. With titles like “Call to freedom,” the manuals make no pretense at objectivity (See Figure 2). In business, it is even worse: official histories are spun by the Public Relations departments of the companies that became dominant in their markets.

Figure 2. Cover of an 8th grade history textbook from the US

The real stories are found in the products, facilities, and documents left over from operations. Jim Womack can still visit today the hall where Venetians assembled galleys 500 years ago.  Examining  sewing machines at the Smithsonian, David Hounshell noticed that  Singer stopped engraving machine serial numbers on parts around 1880, from which he deduces that they mastered interchangeable parts at that time. From memoirs, memos, drawings, specs, photographs and movies we can also infer the methods that were used and the conflicts that took place.

Most of us cannot do this research; we rely on professional historians. They quote their  sources, infer cautiously from the facts, and don’t attempt to answer all questions. By contrast, white belts at history produce glib narratives, make up dialogs among historical figures, and presume to know their inner thoughts. As readers, we should tell the difference.

Did Sakichi Toyoda visit Ford in 1911? Several of the historical notes on Lean claim that he did, but there is no mention of such a visit in  Mass and Robertson’s essay on the life of Sakichi Toyoda. According to their account, Sakichi Toyoda did visit the US and the UK in 1910, to see textile plants and apply for patents, and was back in Japan by January, 1911. Even if he did come in 1911, we may wonder what he might have been impressed with, considering that the first assembly line didn’t start until two years later.

Some of these accounts also state that Sakichi Toyoda invented an automatic loom in 1902. According to other accounts, his work at that time was on narrow steam-powered looms, and his first successful automatic loom  was the Type G in 1924, which included a shuttle-change system developed by his son Kiichiro, who later founded the Toyota car company with the proceeds from the sale of the Type G patent in the UK.

Did Henry Ford invent Lean? Many accounts claim he did. This is puzzling because the term Mass Production was coined specifically to describe the Ford system. If Ford invented Lean, then Lean Manufacturing and Mass Production are the same, and we are wasting our time explaining  how they differ. If Henry Ford invented Lean, then Issac Newton came up with relativity.

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By Michel Baudin • History 13 • Tags: Assembly line, Ford, Lean manufacturing, Takahiro Fujimoto, Toyota

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