Michel Baudin's Blog

Apr 27 2022

Flow

In his latest post on AllAboutLean, Christoph Roser compares the flow of materials in a factory with the flow of traffic on roads. About flow, he asks “But what is it?” but stops short of giving an answer. I also wrote many posts about flow without ever bothering to answer that question. It seemed so obvious and self-explanatory that it didn’t require defining but, perhaps, it does.

By Michel Baudin • Uncategorized • 4 • Tags: Data Flow, Flow, Flow line, Information Flow, Job shop, Material Flow

Mar 8 2022

The Fox Knows Many Things, But The Hedgehog Knows One Big Thing

The first I heard of the intriguing distinction between foxes and hedgehogs is in Woody Allen’s movie Husbands and Wives, in which Sally, played by Judy Davis, maniacally classifies the people in her life as foxes or hedgehogs.

We often use animal metaphors to categorize personalities, roles, or behaviors. Scrum has given us pigs, who are committed to a project, and chickens, who are merely involved. An individual may be foolishly riding a tiger, be someone else’s lapdog, or have a cat’s nine lives…

Was “the hedgehog and the fox” yet another unproven psychological theory? Sadly, yes. Modern psychologists have indeed built a theoretical house of cards on top of a poetic one-liner from 2700 years ago.

By Michel Baudin • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: Psychology, the hedgehog and the fox

Bronze_ruler._Han_Dynasty_206_BCE_to_CE_220._Excavated_in_Zichang_County._Shaanxi_History_Museum_Xian.jpg

Feb 23 2022

Standards, China, and the Industrial Revolution

[Featured image: a Han dynasty bronze ruler]

As a general principle, in manufacturing, you need to do the work the same way every time if you want the output to be consistent. In some cases, like extracting metals from ores, you need to tweak processes to produce consistent output from raw materials of varying compositions. Then the tweaks themselves must be executed consistently so that the response to a particular variation in ore content is always the same.

Standards are an area where China had a 2,000-year headstart but neither the scientific nor the industrial revolutions occurred there.

By Michel Baudin • Technology • 1 • Tags: interchangeable parts, Part standardization, Quality, Standards

Feb 20 2022

Visual Management

[Featured image from Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information)

Tracey Richardson started a spirited discussion on LinkedIn just by posting this quote, presumably from Toyota training materials, and asking “what else would you add to describe ‘Visual Management’”:

By Michel Baudin • Management • 4 • Tags: ISOTYPES, Toyota, TPS, Usability Engineering, Visible Management

Feb 11 2022

Scientific Thinking and Manufacturing Improvement

“Scientific thinking” appears more and more in discussions of Lean, Kaizen, or TPS. What is it? Well, it’s the way scientists think. In reality, however, talk to actual scientists about PDCA, DMAIC, the 8D, A3 thinking, Why-Why analysis, TRIZ, or even statistical design of experiments, and their eyes glaze over. Most will have no idea what these methods are. This is true for physicists, chemists, biologists, or even economists. If you elaborate, they will dismiss these tools as trivial or devoid of any connection with their work.

Improving how things are made does make the world a better place but it’s not science. By growing a body of knowledge that is our greatest asset as a species, scientists make another contribution, that we should recognize as different.

By Michel Baudin • Laws of nature • 1 • Tags: Engineering, Management, Manufacturing, Scientific Thinking, Technology

Jan 24 2022

Does Amazon Use Lean, Six Sigma, or Lean Six Sigma?

In 2019, Christoph Roser posted six articles on his blog about the inner workings of Amazon Fulfillment Centers, based on visits to locations in the US and Germany. His blog is called AllAboutLean but the word “Lean” appears nowhere in his articles about Amazon. “Six Sigma” does not appear either, and Christoph does not mention meeting any black belt.

In addition, in Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon (2021), Amazon alumni Colin Bryar and Bill Carr make no reference to Lean, and all they report about Six Sigma is using DMAIC to define metrics.

Yet you find some published descriptions of Amazon as a showcase for Lean, Six Sigma, or Lean Six Sigma but, if you consider them without confirmation bias, the evidence is underwhelming. The keywords appear, along with a few more, like “Operational Excellence” or “Scrum.”

Based on the small amount of published data, the leaders of Amazon, starting with Jeff Bezos, “learned a bunch of techniques, like Six Sigma and lean manufacturing and other incredibly useful approaches.”

In other words, they learned everything they could get their hands on while staking out uncharted territory. Then they developed their own system. Now they are sharing with outsiders a few homilies but no details, as is their privilege. Their system is to retail as Toyota’s is to manufacturing. It’s not reducible to Lean, Six Sigma, or Lean Six Sigma.

By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 6 • Tags: Alibaba, Amazon, Lean, Lean Six Sigma, Six Sigma, Toyota

Flow

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Visual Management

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Does Amazon Use Lean, Six Sigma, or Lean Six Sigma?

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