Achieving Excellence with Lean Manufacturing

Lean Manufacturing teaches us how to accomplish more with less. It focuses on serving customers with single-minded devotion because it is the customers who pay us. Lean continually reminds us that any activity that does not serve the customer is waste and we should do our best to eliminate it.

The creater of Lean Manufacturing was Toyota, which calls it The Toyota Production System. Lean ideas are often counter-intuitive and people find some of them hard to understand or accept. Some organizations trying to implement Lean do not achieve the success they were hoping for because they did not really have a deep understanding of what they were doing or why they were doing it.

This great article "Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System" from 1999 aims to tell us about some of the deep principles of Lean, the "unspoken rules," the key elements that can make the difference between success and failure in business.

The authors discuss four of the fundamental requirements of a Lean Manufacturing system:

1. All work is highly specified in its content, sequence, timing, and outcome
2. Each worker knows who provides what to him, and when
3. Every product and service flows along a simple, specified path
4. Any improvement to processes, worker/machine connections, or flow paths must be made through the scientific method, under a teacher's guidance, and at the lowest possible organizational level.

The underlying theme of all of these rules, and of the whole article, is the importance of combining rigidity and flexibility in an organization.

Why would we want to combine rigidity and flexibility? And how would we do that?

First, to get consistent performance we need work procedures precisely defined so they are done exactly the same way every time. Think of a checklist followed by a pilot before taking off. This is the rigidity part of the system. Why do we have to be so rigid? If different people do the same job in different ways at different times we will never know for sure what works and what doesn't work! If, on the other hand, we require everyone doing a job to follow exactly the same procedure every time then, if there is something wrong with that procedure, we are going to find out FAST.

Second, to drive continuous improvement, when we discover a situation where a procedure does not work then we need the flexibility part of the system to kick in. We need front-line workers to be trained in problem-solving techniques so they can handle issues quickly and effectively under the guidance of their immediate supervisors. Think of a race car coming into pit row for an emergency repair. Solving a problem with a procedure leads to a new procedure which everyone is required to follow so we can find out if this one works better.

By combining the rigidity of requiring adherence to precisely defined procedures with the flexibility of fast problem solving right on the manufacturing floor we get the advantages of consistent performance of best known practices while simultaneously driving continuous improvements.

That sounds like a great recipe for making a company more successful!

There are other powerful ideas in this article which is worth careful study by anyone interested in improving organizational performance.

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Copyright © 2018 by Joseph Wayne Gadway