Lean

Jun 4 2014

Business Intelligence and Jidoka | Toyota’s Simon Dorrat | PEX

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Simon Dorrat is Manager of Toyota’s Business Intelligence function where he is responsible for defining and delivering all services relating to Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing including BI, ETL, Data Quality, Master Data and OLAP. […] Simon shares his thoughts on how Business Intelligence fits with the Toyota Way, suggests three ways for IT to provide better value to the business and even explains why doing a kitchen renovation helped some illuminate important aspects of software development.

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

For the IT-phobic, a Data Warehouse is a database that makes historical data from multiple sources accessible for analytics. It is commonly used to provide management with Business Intelligence (BI). The process of periodically feeding a data warehouse is called Extract, Transfer and Load (ETL).

Of course, analysis is only worth doing on data that is complete and accurate, hence the need for tools to ensure Data Quality. The different sources usually have different nomenclatures for products, processes, or facilities, and you need your Master Data to integrate them in a single, consistent model. Finally, “OLAP” stands for Online Analytical Processing.

The first sentence in the article describes Toyota as “creating the precursor to Lean Manufacturing” and nearly made me stop reading further. It would have been a mistake.

See on www.processexcellencenetwork.com

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May 16 2014

Does the World Need More MBAs? | Sally Blount says “Yes” | Business Week

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“Business is our most important social institution—improving the lives of millions. Yet it falls far short of its potential to serve society […]  When you’re creating the next Google, Tencent, or Apple, you’re going to need people with the training, skills, and network that business education is uniquely good at providing. There’s a reason all of those companies hire people with MBAs. Even more important than the skills argument, however, is the intellectual argument for an MBA education, where there is critical knowledge to be gained. Business has evolved to be the dominant social institution of our age. Business is the cultural, organizational, and economic superforce in human development.”

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Bill Waddell disagrees. I do too, for different reasons.

While I agree with Blount about the value of business skills, I see MBA programs as steeped in the druckerian fallacy that management is a profession in its own right, like Medicine or Engineering, and that a well-trained manager can be equally effective at running businesses in any industry, whether selling sugared water or making computers that change the world.

Rather than being a specialty in its own right, “Business Administration” is best viewed as a set of skills that complements industry-specific knowledge and experience.

That business is “the cultural, organizational, and economic superforce in human development” is something the dean of a business school would say. You could easily make the case for other forms of human endeavors, like universal public education, scientific research, or even democracy.

Bill Waddell seems to think that MBAs are inherently unable to implement and sustain Lean. I have, however, met several leaders who excelled at Lean while having MBAs. But it was not all they had.

A unique feature of this degree is that it takes over the identity of its holders, to the point that they describe themselves as “being MBAs” rather than “having MBAs.” The ones I have admired for their excellence in Lean had an engineering degree and had worked as engineers before getting MBAs.

See on www.businessweek.com

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Apr 22 2014

When “Lean” is Watered Down to “The Customer is King”

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Making your business lean might be a surefire way to lose customers | Quartz.com |Stephen MacIntyre

“Recently, I lost my wallet and had to replace a couple of bank cards (a situation millions of people face yearly). The first bank I called required me to slowly navigate through an automated system with an endless succession of prompts, while I grew increasingly frustrated and weary. Finally—after almost an hour!—a robotic voice told me that I would receive a new card in about a week.”

http://qz.com/190968/making-your-business-lean-might-be-a-surefire-way-to-lose-customers/

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

The Toyota Production System (TPS) is the best performing way we know to build cars, and it has a rich technical and managerial content. From the 1970s on, Toyota promoted among its suppliers. They were joined in the 1980s by Toyota’s competitors and a few non-automotive pioneers, who didn’t fully understand it.

Rebranded “Lean” in the 1990s, it was sold first in many manufacturing sectors and then outside of manufacturing. As a consequence, however, the “Lean Body of Knowledge” offered by most consultants and training organizations became more and more generic, and gradually drained of substance.

In this article, Lean boils down to “maximizing customer value using fewer resources.” If that is what Lean is,  then I don’t know any businessperson — from my local dry-cleaner to the CEO of a major manufacturing company — who would not claim to doing it. They might express it in simpler words, like “taking care of customers without wasting money,” but the meaning is the same.

“The customer is king” is Business 101, not the defining characteristic of TPS or Lean as I see it, which addresses the needs of all stakeholders, not just customers. A “relentless customer focus” may be what you want to tell customers about, but it is not the basis for providing supplier support or career planning for production operators.

See on qz.com

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Apr 5 2014

Lean Systems Program Turns 20 This Year | UKNow

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“It has been 20 years since the University of Kentucky took its first big step on the road to becoming a world-leading center for lean systems research and training.

The journey began in 1993, when representatives from the UK College of Engineering embarked on a series of discussions with Toyota leaders, regarding the possibility of collaboration in lean knowledge development and manufacturing research and development.[…]”

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Congratulations!

This story is about a Lean certification program at the University of Kentucky (UK),  not in the United Kingdom.

I have some reservations about Lean Certification in general and the following comments about the University of Kentucky program in particular, based on the online syllabus:

The University of Kentucky’s program includes Core Courses — a train-the-trainer program — and Specialty Courses — for professionals outside of production operations. Some but not all the specialty courses are targeted at functions within the organization but others are about tools. Just the core courses add up to three one-week training sessions, while each specialty course is typically a one- or two-day workshop.

From the University’s web site, however, I cannot tell when, or if, participants ever learn how to design a machining cell, or an assembly line, or how to reduce setup times. In the core courses, it’s great to talk about mindsets, culture, and transformational leadership, but where is the engineering red meat?

The specialty courses address planning, improvement methods, logistics, supplier development, and other unquestionably important topics, but offer nothing about manufacturing or industrial engineering.

 

 

See on uknow.uky.edu

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Apr 3 2014

Saskatchewan Health Care Data Not Showing Improvements from Lean?

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“[…]The government has stated that its kaizan promotion offices do not measure or evaluate lean, and that no reports have been written. At the same time, however, it has stated that lean has already demonstrated benefits. To test this, I reviewed the HQC website – Quality Insight – that has a significant amount of provincial data. For each indicator I will report the first and last month or year where data were collected.[…]”

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

The article’s author, Mark Lemstra, from The StarPhoenix, claims that Lean yielded no improvement in the financial or medical performance of Saskatchewan’s health care system,  based on data from the Health Quality Council (HQC).

The article’s title is only about “Savings,” but most of the body is about health outcomes and perceptions, and presented through numbers buried in text.

Before taking this article at face value, I recommend checking out the HQC website directly. As in the featured image above, some metrics have clearly improved. Other indicators are flat, like  the willingness of patients to recommend their hospital, or the rate of medical error reports. And some have moved in the wrong direction, such as those related to pain management.

It is perhaps not the rosy pictures that the Lean boosters would like, but neither is it the disaster Lemstra is painting.

See on www.thestarphoenix.com

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Mar 30 2014

The Discovery of Lean | Narrated Prezi by Mark Warren

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Brief description on the origins of lean. Lean is an outcome of implementing Flow Principles + the TWI program

 

 

 

 

Michel Baudin‘s  comments:

This is a short version of a one-hour presentation I heard live a few months ago. Mark’s take is the result of more than 30 years of practical experience in all sorts of plants around the world and more than a decade of intensive research of original documents in numerous archives in several countries.

To understand where concepts and techniques are useful in manufacturing today, we need to know who invented them and for what purpose. The historical perspective is not a luxury, and the explanations of this history must be accurate if it is to enlighten us.

At historical research, Mark is a pro; I am an amateur. John Hunter thinks I have a “library full of dusty tomes.” In truth, I only have a few old books on manufacturing, half of them recommended by Mark.

See on prezi.com

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