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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Have you thought about using Lean in your business or organization, but are not really sure how to implement it? Or perhaps you're already using Lean, but you need to get up to speed. Lean for Dummies will show you how to do more with less and create an enterprise that embraces change. In plain-English writing, this friendly guide explores the general overview of Lean, how flow and the value stream works, and the best ways to apply Lean to your enterprise. You will understand the philosophy of Lean and adopt it not as a routine, but a way of life. This highly informative book teaches you: * The foundation and language of Lean * How to map the value stream and using it to your business's advantage * The philosophy of Kaizen * Different tools to improve management, customer service, and flow and pull * How to "Go Lean" within your business and across the industry * Avoid common mistakes in implementation * Seek out resources for assistance This simple, continuous improvement approach that minimizes waste and adds customer value is changing organizations of all sizes all over the world. Lean for Dummies will show you to take charge and engage your enterprise in a Lean transformation!
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Seitenzahl: 532
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011
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Lean For Dummies®
by Natalie J. Sayer and Bruce Williams
Lean For Dummies®
Published byWiley Publishing, Inc.111 River St.Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2007 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
Published simultaneously in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-646-8600. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax 201-748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2006939603
ISBN: 978-0-470-09931-5
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6
About the Authors
Natalie J. Sayer began studying and applying Lean before it was formally known as Lean. Over her 20-year career in the automotive industry in the United States and Mexico, Natalie honed her skills applying Lean and Organizational Development methods across functional areas of Fortune 130 companies. In 1996, Natalie was an instrumental team member in the Lean transformation of a GM facility in Matamoros, Mexico. The team was awarded the 1996 GM President’s Council Honors for the project. While working with General Motors, she had multiple opportunities to visit and learn from New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI). Natalie has trained, coached, mentored, and rolled up her sleeves to implement Lean practices, whether working in a company or volunteering at a food bank.
She received a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering from the University of Dayton in 1988 and a Master of Manufacturing Systems Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1992. She is a graduate of Coach University and Corporate Coach University. Natalie is also a Six Sigma Black Belt and a Global Leadership Executive Coach.
In 2003, Natalie founded I-Emerge, an Arizona-based global consultancy dedicated to the facilitation of people and processes experiencing significant change. The I-Emerge toolbox includes executive and personal coaching, group facilitation, Lean methods, public speaking, and Organizational Development tools and assessments. She is a passionate people person, who lives her life with the convictions that “there is always a better way” and “change won’t happen without the people.”
Beyond I-Emerge, Natalie can be found on stage acting in musical theater, teaching graduate school, traveling to exotic places, learning something new, working on causes advancing people and literacy, or spending time with friends and family.
Bruce Williams strives for perfection and added value as a scientist, educator, consultant, and entrepreneur. Leveraging the Lean principle of standardized work, this is his third For Dummies book in three years, having previously coauthored the best-selling Six Sigma For Dummies in 2005 and the Six Sigma Workbook For Dummies in 2006.
Undergraduate degrees in physics and astrophysics from the University of Colorado testify to his early pursuit of understanding the ultimate nature of root cause.
He was a sculler in the value stream of aerospace systems, where he shot the rapids in the tumultuous whitewater of the Hubble Space Telescope program. With graduate degrees in technical management and computer science from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Colorado, Bruce elevated his value-stream role to that of tugboat captain, leading and managing technical teams and projects.
A decade of personal Kaizen has inspired his continuous journey through technology, software, business development, and management. A Kaikaku moment unleashed his entrepreneurial self in 1999. He is now sea captain of Savvi International, charting the deeper value-stream waters of solutions for business performance improvement using Six Sigma, Lean, and Business Process Management.
He lives with his standard family in the rural desert foothills of North Scottsdale, Arizona, flowing just-in-time value in response to their continuous demand pull. He regularly suffers the muri of 5S’ing the house on weekends. His hobbies include mucking the muda of the family horses.
Dedication
Natalie J. Sayer: To Frank Cooney, Al Billis, and Pam Oakes, my first Lean teachers; to Jim, Patt, and Eric Sayer, my family who support all my endeavors; and to Anne Ramsey, Derek O’Neal, Lori Kobriger, and the rest of my inner circle. Thank you all.
Bruce Williams: To the Lean person within all of us. Recognize and nurture your Lean self. Every waste you eliminate today sets the stage for a better world tomorrow.
Authors’ Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge Craig Gygi for his expertise, dedication, and encouragement. You established the standard for us to follow; we hope we’ve done you proud.
We especially thank Frank Cooney for his mentoring, advice, and technical review. Lean can be a hard thing to pin down. Thanks, Frank, for bringing your tremendous body of practical experience to bear.
We’d also like to acknowledge our good friends and colleagues Janet Young, Vern Young, Dr. Deborah Peck, Eleanor Clements, Scott Kurish, and Dr. Kiran Garimella for your counsel, ideas, review, and support. Additionally, we’d like to acknowledge everyone at the Phoenix Think Tank, a place where great minds, ideas, and support meet to create “an exquisite shifting in thought.”
Thanks to Ken Carraher of iGrafx and Debbie Rosen of webMethods for their unflinching support in providing whatever we needed. We could easily have filled the book with value-stream maps, process models, and dashboards. We’ll just have to save them all for the Lean Workbook For Dummies!
As authors and researchers, we humbly bow to the miracle that is Google.
All people interested in Lean owe their ongoing gratitude to Mark Graban and his associates, who through their blog site translate Lean to the world around us.
As consumers, and on behalf of consumers everywhere, we acknowledge the uniquely groundbreaking contributions of brilliant pioneers W. Edwards Deming, Taiichi Ohno, and Shigeo Shingo, as well as U.S. Lean leaders Norm Bodek and Jim Womack. Through their achievements, we are all better off.
But most of all, we acknowledge the many thousands of Lean practitioners around the world, who regularly confront established structures, functional silos, arcane accounting practices, and entrenched procedures to cut the waste and find the real customer value. You make Lean thrive. You are our heroes.
Publisher’s Acknowledgments
We’re proud of this book; please send us your comments through our Dummies online registration form located at www.dummies.com/register/.
Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:
Acquisitions, Editorial, and Media Development
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Technical Editor: Francis D. Cooney
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Editorial Assistants: Erin Calligan, Joe Niesen, Leeann Harney, David Lutton
Cartoons: Rich Tennant (www.the5thwave.com)
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Anniversary Logo Design: Richard Pacifico
Proofreader: Aptara
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Special Help Tim Gallan
Publishing and Editorial for Consumer Dummies
Diane Graves Steele, Vice President and Publisher, Consumer Dummies
Joyce Pepple, Acquisitions Director, Consumer Dummies
Kristin A. Cocks, Product Development Director, Consumer Dummies
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Publishing for Technology Dummies
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Debbie Stailey, Director of Composition Services
Contents
Title
Introduction
About This Book
Conventions Used in This Book
Foolish Assumptions
How This Book Is Organized
Icons Used in This Book
Where to Go from Here
Part I : Lean Basics
Chapter 1: Defining Lean
What Is Lean?
The Lean Pedigree
Lean and Its Continuous Process Improvement Cousins
Chapter 2: The Foundation and Language of Lean
Understanding Lean Basics
Getting into Shape
Part II : Understanding Flow and the Value Stream
Chapter 3: Seeing Value through the Eyes of the Customer
What Is Value?
To Add Value or Not to Add Value, That Is the Question
Understanding How the Customer Defines Value
Understanding How the Consumer Defines Value
Introducing the Value Stream
Chapter 4: A Resource Runs through It: Value Stream Mapping
The Who, What, and Why of Value Stream Maps
Row, Row, Row Your Boat: Getting Started
Sorting Through the Tributaries: Creating the Current-State Value Stream Map
Summing Up the Process
Check the Chart: Validating the Value Stream Map
Chapter 5: Charting the Course: Using Value Stream Maps
Investigating the Value Stream for Clues
Painting a Picture of the Future
Creating the Mosaic of Continuous Improvement: Setting the Stage for Kaizen
Chapter 6: Flowing in the Right Direction: Lean Projects and Kaizen
Kaizen: A Way of Life
Improving the Value Stream with Kaizen
Kaizen: The Workshop
Part III : The Lean Toolbox
Chapter 7: Customer and Value-Stream Tools
Communing with the Customer
Working with the Value Stream
Using Qualitative Tools
Working with Software Tools
Chapter 8: Flow and Pull Tools
Flow
Pull
Chapter 9: Perfection Tools
Beginning with Standardized Work
Improving with Kaizen
Seeing Is Knowing: Visual-Management Tools
Everyday Improvement Tools
Computer Tools
Chapter 10: Management Tools
Managing Strategy
Go and See
Software and Information Management
Part IV : The Lean Enterprise
Chapter 11: Lean in the Organization: Principles, Behaviors, and Change
Assessing Organizational Culture
Changing the Organization
Forecasting the Future
Chapter 12: Power to the People
The Human Side of Change
The Master and the Students
Chapter 13: Go Lean: Implementation Strategy, Startup, and Evolution
Preparing to Go Lean
Beginning the Journey: The Lean Rollout
Living Lean
Chapter 14: Lean within the Enterprise
Lean Enterprise Management
Lean Product Development
Lean Supplier Management
Lean Production Processes
Lean Customer Management
Lean and the Quality Organization
Chapter 15: Lean across Industry
Starting with What’s Common
Lean Manufacturing
Lean Services
Lean Transactions
Lean Government
Lean in Healthcare
Lean Everywhere
Part V : The Part of Tens
Chapter 16: Ten Best Practices of Lean
Feel the Force (of the Customer), Luke
Step by Step, Inch by Inch
Follow the Value Stream
Eat Your Vegetables
Turn Over a Rock
People First!
Genchi Gambutsu
The Art of Simplicity
At a Glance
Standardize Something — Standardize Everything!
Chapter 17: Ten Pitfalls to Avoid
Yawn
Same-Old Same-Old Senior Management
Quick Fix!
Cherry-Picking
Beans Are Beans
Playing the Shell Game
The Grease Monkeys
Busy Bees
Stuck in the Middle Again
Lean Six Sigma
Chapter 18: Ten Places to Go for Help
Books and Publications
Online Information
Blog Sites
Professional Societies and Associations
Conferences and Symposia
Consultants, Facilitators, and Trainers
Lean Periodicals
Software Providers
Practitioners
Related Genres
Glossary
: Further Reading
Introduction
The principles and practices of Lean organizations are recognized the world over as the most powerful and effective way to build and sustain continuously improving businesses and institutions. Following a Lean path, any business in any industry of any size or type can improve itself continuously over the long term. Led by advancements first pioneered at the Toyota Motor Corporation over 50 years ago, Lean is now established as the most consistently successful approach to organizing and operating any enterprise.
If you’re in certain manufacturing industries, or public institutions like the U.S. military, you’ve probably heard about Lean. You may even have been through a Kaizen event or been part of implementing a pull system. If so, you’ve already experienced some of the power of Lean tools.
But if you’re like most people, the term Lean itself may be unfamiliar to you, let alone its principles and practices. Even within those businesses and organizations that have adopted Lean methods, most people don’t really understand the bigger picture of Lean. Organizations often implement Lean piecemeal, leaving some of the most important elements behind — and with much less than optimal results.
For decades, the whole system of Lean principles and practices was known only to specialized manufacturers, certain academic researchers, and quality gurus. The Toyota Production System (TPS) was the incubator where the methods, techniques, and tools of Lean were pioneered and refined. Its full potential has been a mystery to most organizations and professionals.
All that began to change in the late 1980s, as the term Lean was coined to describe the fundamentals of business systems like TPS to the rest of the world. As the understanding of Lean has spread across continents, industries, and organizations, it has become less of a mystery and much easier to understand and implement.
Simply stated, Lean is a philosophy and a proven long-term approach that aligns everything in the business to deliver increasing customer value. It’s about orienting people and systems to deliver a continuous stream of value to the customer, and eliminate waste and deficiencies in the process. Lean is an everyday practice at all levels to perform consistently, as well as to consistently improve performance.
About This Book
This book makes Lean accessible to you. We wrote it because Lean is applicable everywhere — it’s applicable in large and complex corporations, but also in small businesses and industries, as well as public-sector institutions — at all levels.
We wrote this book for you, the individual. You may be a small-business owner, an ambitious career person, or a manager who wants to know what Lean is and how to apply it. You may be a college student or job applicant who wants to have an edge in upcoming job interviews. No matter who you are, if you want to know more about Lean, this is the book for you.
Lean For Dummies is not just an overview or survey of Lean. It’s a comprehensive description of the philosophies and principles of Lean, as well as the methods and tools to put Lean into practice.
This book is
A reference book that’s organized into parts, chapters, and sections, so that you can flip right to what you need, when you need it
A comprehensive text that addresses both the common tools of Lean and the improvement principles and practices
A guide for leading a Lean initiative, helping you identify and manage Lean projects, and using Lean tools and procedures
Step-by-step instructions for Value Stream Mapping and the methodology of Lean projects
Instructions on where you can go for additional help, because the field of Lean is much too large to fit in just a few hundred pages
Lean is different, and it contains Japanese terms and ideas that may be foreign to you. But we’ve taken this difficult subject and made it understandable through examples, simple explanations, and visual aids.
Conventions Used in This Book
When a specialized word first appears in our book, we italicize it, and provide a definition. We also italicize any foreign-language words, including the many Japanese terms that make up the lingo of Lean.
For terms and phrases that industry practitioners use as acronyms, we define the term first and then use it in its abbreviated form going forward.
We put any Web addresses and e-mail addresses in monofont, to set it apart from the rest of the text. When this book was printed, some Web addresses may have needed to break across two lines of text. If that happened, rest assured that we haven’t put in any extra characters (such as hyphens) to indicate the break. So, when using one of these Web addresses, just type in exactly what you see in this book, pretending as though the line break doesn’t exist.
We use some business-management and statistical concepts and language in the course of the book. To get extra smart on the statistical and problem-solving aspects, check out Six Sigma For Dummies, by Craig Gygi, Neil DeCarlo, and Bruce Williams; Six Sigma Workbook for Dummies by Craig Gygi, Bruce Williams, and Terry Gustafson. Also check out Managing For Dummies, 2nd Edition, by Bob Nelson, PhD, and Peter Economy; Statistics For Dummies, by Deborah Rumsey, PhD; and Coaching & Mentoring For Dummies and Managing Teams For Dummies, both by Marty Brounstein (all published by Wiley).
Foolish Assumptions
We assume you’ve heard something about Lean and are intrigued and compelled to find out more, for one or more of the following reasons:
You’re contemplating using Lean in your business or organization, and you need to understand what you might be in for.
Your business or organization is implementing Lean, and you need to get up to speed. Perhaps you’ve even been tapped to participate in a Kaizen event or a Value Stream Mapping exercise.
You believe Lean is the pathway to better performance in your job and can help you advance your career.
You’re considering a job or career change, and your new opportunities require you to understand Lean practices.
You’re a student in business, international business, operations, or industrial engineering and you realize that Lean is part of your future.
We assume that you realize Lean demands a rigorous approach to analyzing the value stream of business processes. We also assume that you accept that Lean practice calls for capturing data and applying analytical tools to discover the true nature of value creation and the causes of waste in your environment. In addition, we assume that you might be from any industry, including manufacturing, service, transactional, healthcare, or even government. For these reasons, we have devoted several chapters of this book to describing and defining the Lean toolset.
How This Book Is Organized
We break this book into five separate parts. Each chapter is written as an independent standalone section, which means you can move around the book and delve into a given topic without necessarily having to read all the preceding material first. Anywhere we expound upon or extend other material, we cross-reference the chapter or part of origin, so you can tie it together.
Part I: Lean Basics
Part I is an overview of Lean, including the pedigree, tenets, and language of Lean. In this part, we address the key tenets underlying the foundation of Lean practice. Chapter 1 is a comprehensive overview of Lean. Chapter 2 addresses the key tenets as well as the language and lexicon of Lean.
Part II: Understanding Flow and the Value Stream
Part II gets into the essence of Lean: understanding the way value is created and flowed to the customer. In four chapters, we thoroughly describe the flow of value. Chapter 3 defines value precisely, in terms of the customer and the end consumer. Chapter 4 introduces and explains the process of Value Stream Mapping, one of the key tools of Lean. Chapter 5 explains how to use a Value Stream Map to define where you want to go and how you’ll approach getting there. Chapter 6 explains the principles and practices of Kaizen — the basis for continuous improvement.
Part III: The Lean Toolbox
In this part, we present a comprehensive listing and overview of the many customer, value stream, flow, pull, perfection, and management tools of Lean in four chapters. Collectively, these tools form the Lean toolkit.
Chapter 7 describes the many tools used to understand the value stream and customer needs and wants. Chapter 8 describes the flow and pull tools. Chapter 9 covers the perfection tools used within Lean to create standardized work, improve with Kaizen, visualization, and everyday improvements. Chapter 10 addresses the management tools of hoshin,gemba, and the growing suite of software applications that support Lean practice.
Part IV: The Lean Enterprise
Part IV contains five chapters and describes how Lean becomes part of the enterprise. In this part, we explain the issues and challenges with implementing Lean in an organization. Chapter 11 addresses organizational issues specifically. Chapter 12 focuses on the people elements of Lean — often the most overlooked (and risky) part. Chapter 13 addresses the life cycle of a Lean implementation, from strategy to startup and, finally, evolution. Chapter 14 explains how Lean works in the different functions and organization of a business. Chapter 15 addresses Lean in different industries.
Part V: The Part of Tens
This part, in the For Dummies tradition, is a compilation of key points of reference. Chapter 16 discusses ten practices for success. Chapter 17 addresses ten pitfalls to avoid. And in Chapter 18, we tell you about ten additional places you can go for help.
Icons Used in This Book
Throughout the book, you’ll see small symbols called icons in the margins, and these highlight special types of information. We use these to help you better understand and apply the material. When you see any of the following icons, this is what they mean:
These are key points to remember that can help you implement Lean successfully.
When you see this icon, we’re cautioning you to beware of a particular risk or pitfall that could cause you trouble.
This icon flags a detailed technical issue or reference. Feel free to skip right over these, if you don’t want to dig deeper.
We use this icon to summarize information into short, memorable thoughts.
Where to Go from Here
The beauty of a For Dummies book is that you don’t have to start at the beginning and slowly work your way through. Instead, each chapter is self-contained, which means you can start with whichever chapters interest you the most. You can use Lean For Dummies as a reference book, which means you can jump in and out of certain parts, chapters, and sections as you wish.
Here are some suggestions on where to start:
If you’re brand new to Lean, start at the beginning, with Chapter 1.
Want to know about the basics of Value Stream Mapping? Check out Chapter 4.
If you want to know all the tools of Lean, jump in at Chapter 7.
Interested in the organizational and people elements of Lean? Go to Chapters 11 and 12.
If you want to understand all the Lean lingo and terminology, flip to the glossary.
Lean is a journey. Like any journey, it is exciting and exhilarating, stretching and life altering, challenging and unexpected. But it is worth it. We wish you well on this journey. With this book by your side, you have what it takes to live Lean and thrive!
Part I
Lean Basics
In this part . . .
T hink of Lean as a fitness program for your business. Like a diet and exercise regime for your body, Lean is a way to get your business fit for life, through a focus on your customer, the implementation of new business practices, and the ongoing commitment to continuous improvement. In this part, we fill you in on the foundations, philosophy, and basics of Lean.
Chapter 1
Defining Lean
In This Chapter
Knowing that Lean is big
Understanding that Lean is a philosophy, a framework, a methodology, techniques, and tools
Probing the Lean pedigree
Figuring out how Lean fits in with the global family of business improvement systems
When you first hear the word lean, it conjures up an image. Most likely, you’re seeing a mental picture of thin people — like long-distance runners, or those aerobics junkies who somehow don’t seem to have an ounce of extra fat on them. Or maybe you’re thinking about lean food — the foods that are lower in fat and, of course, much better for you. Lean also implies lightweight, in the sense of speed and agility, with a sort of edge or underlying aggressiveness that recalls the rhyme “lean and mean.”
That’s because the word lean suggests not only a physical condition, but also a certain discipline — a mental toughness. The notion of Lean carries with it a commitment to a set of principles and practices that not only get you fit, but keep you fit. People who are lean seem to be that way not just temporarily, but continuously. Lean people are committed to being lean; they act a certain way in their habits and routines. Lean isn’t a fad or diet — it’s a way of life.
Now take this concept and apply it to a business or organization. What do you see? What does lean mean, business-wise? Back in 1988, a group of researchers working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), led by Dr. James P. Womack, were examining the international automotive industry, and observed unique behaviors at the Toyota Motor Company (TMC). Researcher John Krafcik and the others struggled with a term to describe what they were seeing. They looked at all the performance attributes of a Toyota-style system, compared to traditional mass production. What they saw was a company that:
Needed less effort to design, make, and service their products
Required less investment to achieve a given level of production capacity
Produced products with fewer defects
Used fewer suppliers
Performed its key processes — including concept-to-launch, order-to-delivery, and problem-to-repair — in less time and with less effort
Needed less inventory at every step
Had fewer employee injuries
They concluded that a company like this, a company that uses less of everything, is a “lean” company.
And just like that, the term lean became associated with a certain business capability — the ability to accomplish more with less. Lean organizations use less human effort to perform their work, less material to create their products and services, less time to develop them, and less energy and space to produce them. They’re oriented toward customer demand, and develop high-quality products and services in the most effective and economical manner possible. (See Table 1-1 for a comparison of mass production and Lean.)
The practice of Lean — from here on capitalized because, in this context, it’s a proper noun — is, therefore, a commitment to the set of tenets and behaviors that not only gets your organization fit, but keeps it that way.
Lean has become a worldwide movement. Lean concepts aren’t new; the techniques, in various forms, have been practiced in companies large and small around the globe for decades. But the term Lean has crystallized a particular set of ideas and concepts:
Maintaining an unrelenting focus on providing customer value
Adopting a philosophy of continuous, incremental improvement
Providing exactly what’s needed at the right time, based on customer demand
Keeping things moving — in a value-added, effective manner
Using techniques for reducing variation and eliminating waste
Respecting people
Taking the long-term view
Lean has been adopted across a broad range of industries, most notably automotive, but also aerospace, banking, construction, energy, healthcare, and government. Dozens of consulting firms, hundreds of training courses, and thousands of books and articles all chronicle the many aspects of Lean practice. Consulting firms have developed Lean implementation programs for every business function, including management, manufacturing, administration, supply chains, product design, and even software development. Lean has become a recognized methodology. It even has an award: The Shingo Prize, called “the Nobel Prize of Manufacturing” by Business Week, was developed to promote Lean practices, and has been awarded in North America each year since 1988. Honoring the renowned engineering genius Shigeo Shingo, its purpose is to “promote awareness of Lean manufacturing concepts.”
This is all interesting enough, but what really matters is that the customers are the better for it — much better, in fact. It’s been invisible to most people, but Lean has brought to everyone vastly improved products and services — and it’s brought them faster, cheaper, and more reliably. Its successes have saved billions of dollars. Its competitiveness has forced previously bloated, self-absorbed organizations to retool themselves and focus on customer value. And it has equipped struggling companies and industries with methods and techniques to improve their performance.
The many dimensions of Lean — its tenets and philosophies, the methodology and techniques, the tools and applications, and the management frameworks — have evolved considerably since that day in 1988. Lean is now a science and a practice.
In this book, we fill you in on the origins and applications of Lean practice. But although Lean has a toolset, it is much more than a set of tools. Lean is a philosophy, an approach to your life and work. Lean is a journey, with no predefined path or end state. It’s a way forward that guarantees continuous improvement. Lean isn’t a diet or a fad, it’s a way of life.
What Is Lean?
Lean is a broad catchphrase that describes a holistic and sustainable approach that uses less of everything to give you more. Lean is a business strategy based on satisfying the customer by delivering quality products and services that are just what the customer needs, when the customer needs them, in the amount required, at the right price, while using the minimum of materials, equipment, space, labor, and time. Lean practices enable an organization to reduce its development cycles, produce higher-quality products and services at lower costs, and use resources more efficiently.
Although the term Lean has been most directly associated with manufacturing and production processes, Lean practices cover the total enterprise, embracing all aspects of operations, including internal functions, supplier networks, and customer value chains.
Lean is a continuous, evolutionary process of change and adaptation, not a singular, idealized vision or technology-driven goal state. A central organizing principle is the long-term renewable enterprise, where the organization builds sustaining relationships with all its stakeholders, including employees, managers, owners, suppliers, distributors, and customers, as well as community, society, and the environment.
Lean means less of many things — less waste, shorter cycle times, fewer suppliers, less bureaucracy. But Lean also means more — more employee knowledge and empowerment, more organizational agility and capability, more productivity, more satisfied customers, and more long-term success.
Waste not, want not
What’s the least possible amount of material, time, space, facilities, capital, energy, effort, or whatever else you need to develop and deliver a given product or service to your customer? You wouldn’t want to use any more than you really need to get the customer what they require. Anything more than the absolute minimum is essentially waste.
The sources of waste are everywhere:
Using more raw material than necessary: Not only are you buying, transporting, and storing the extra raw material in the first place, but you then have to pay to transport and dispose of damaged or obsolete goods.
Spending more time to develop and produce your products and services: You’re not just making the customer wait — you’re also consuming energy, wasting people’s time and using facilities to store and move around materials and work. And there’s the opportunity cost of delayed payment.
Making mistakes: Not only are mistakes frustrating to you, your coworkers, and your management, as well as the customer, but you have to spend more time and use more materials doing it over.
Overproducing and carrying excess inventory: Excess inventory directly wastes space. Plus, it has to be handled and maintained. And what’s the sense in making more than you’re selling?
Using more space than necessary: Space is facility and capital cost, as well as the energy and labor to maintain it.
Spending more money than necessary: It doesn’t take an accountant to know that spending more money than you should to get something done is wasteful!
Using more equipment and tools than necessary: Not only are those extra tools and equipment expensive, but they also have to be stored, repaired, and maintained.
Involving more people than necessary: People are extremely valuable and expensive, and they should be engaged in doing only what’s most important.
Having incorrect or incomplete information or instructions: It results in mistakes, rework, scrap, lost time, and missed deadlines — plus, it can be hazardous.
Having people work improperly: This is the most wasteful of all. Not only is it a direct waste of time and effort, but it’s damaging to the psyche and to morale. It’s also potentially physically harmful and dangerous.
The logic of Lean
In Lean, you pursue understanding the source and rooting out the causes of waste. The practice of Lean as the root-cause eliminator of wastefulness is based on a core set of fundamental assumptions. Follow this logic:
You’re in business to sell products and services to customers. The customer has the need and defines the purpose. Everything begins and ends with what the customer requires. Everything else is fluff.
The customer is the only true arbiter of value. The customer is willing to give you their money for your product or service only when they believe it’s a fair exchange of value. It has to be the right combination of quality products and services, in the right place, at the right time and at the right price.
Value-creation is a process. A combination of steps — such as marketing, design, production, processing, delivery and support — rightly performed, will result in the creation of products and services that the customer will properly value.
Waste diminishes the process of value creation. Things that naturally creep in and prevent the steps in a process from flowing quickly and effectively will inhibit the creation of customer value.
A perfect process has no waste. If every step in the process is fully capable, acts only when necessary, flows perfectly, and adapts to perform exactly as needed, the process will develop and deliver products and services without waste.
Perfect processes maximize customer value. The closer to perfection a process becomes, the more effective the creation of value, the more satisfied the customers, and the more successful the endeavor.
No one has ever experienced the perfect process, but Lean continually strives for perfection. Lean is the strategy and approach, and it provides the methods and tools for pursuing the perfect process.
Where is Lean?
Lean is found wherever there is waste, and anywhere there is opportunity for improvement. In other words, Lean is found everywhere. It’s not confined to any particular part of the organization or function of the enterprise. Although formal Lean practices began in manufacturing, they apply across the board.
It’s in the enterprise
Lean is a business-improvement initiative, best applied enterprise-wide. A common misconception holds Lean as a sort of manufacturing quality program. Not so. The philosophy, principles, and practices of Lean are applicable anywhere, and they’re most effective when applied across the entire organization. You may have heard jargon that implies certain groups or functions practice Lean, such as the following:
Lean Production or Lean Manufacturing: Early in the formalization of Lean techniques, the practices were modeled after manufacturing and production approaches in companies like Toyota. Enormous successes ensued in other manufacturing companies as Lean practitioners applied the techniques in other manufacturing environments. As a result, these labels took hold.
Lean Office and Lean Administration:These references note that the practices have been applied with great success in office environments, where the value streams are policy-based, information-oriented decision making and involve the effective management of transactions and data.
Lean Management:This term is most often associated with the role of managers in the Lean enterprise. This covers the management of a Lean initiative, as well as the personal Lean practices of the managers themselves.
Lean Thinking:Because Lean is more than just tools and techniques, people within an effective Lean organization apply Lean practices as a way of thinking — a way of approaching issues and challenges. After you’ve truly adopted the ways of Lean, you’ll be a Lean thinker.
Lean Thinking is also the name of a book by James Womack and Daniel Jones, first published in 1996, which stands as a milestone in Lean. It was in this landmark work that everyone began to associate Lean with more than just Toyota and automotive and began thinking of Lean as a movement of its own.
Each of these monikers represents an element of Lean in its own right, but only as a single facet or subset of the greater Lean enterprise. In fact, Lean is all of these and more.
Think of Lean in the enterprise not as a group of functional or departmental practices, but as a set of multidisciplinary practices that cross functional lines. Lean focuses on the processes that create customer value, which by their nature are cross-functional. Examples include the supplier-assembler process, the assembler-distributor-customer process, the marketing-design-development process, the company-shareholder process, and the company-government-regulatory process. In each of these cases, work is not aligned by classic Western-style functional departments. Instead, the process is facilitated by multidisciplinary teams — and in a Lean enterprise, the individuals on these teams are cross-trained as well.
It’s in the people
Lean practice calls for a set of facilitating tools and techniques (covered in Part III) that focus the organization on eliminating waste and maximizing customer value. Although the tools are important, Lean is just as much about the people as the tools. This is a critical point — companies that have failed to recognize this have done so with disastrous consequences.
A successful Lean journey puts as much emphasis on the people in the organization as it does on the methods, tools, and techniques of Lean practice. The journey must engage everyone, continually educate and train them, challenge and empower them. Employees must be safe and feel secure in their work environment and job situations. They must be stimulated and incentivized, celebrated and compensated.
People are highly valued in the Lean organization. They are more important than tools and fixtures, equipment, material, or capital. Some Lean organizations have promised work for life, in return for an individual’s commitment and dedication to pursuing perfection.
It’s in the culture
In a Lean organization, the tenets and philosophy of Lean are fundamentally part of its fiber; Lean is very much embedded in the organization’s culture. Everyone practices Lean techniques habitually. When you observe an organization practicing Lean, you will see that:
People always look at activities as processes, and consider them in terms of customer value and eliminating the wasteful non-value-added steps.
People naturally call for Kaizen events to brainstorm the elimination of waste, and implement Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) or other projects to effect improvements.
People regularly communicate through Value-Stream Maps, team meetings in the work area, process flow diagrams, communication centers, graphical analyses, control charts, and other explicit instruments.
Everyone makes improvement suggestions — continually.
Visual signs and cues are everywhere. People are in deliberate and decisive motion, performing standardized work. Meetings are short and crisp.
People regularly take on new roles and tasks in order to be more complete team contributors. They embrace learning, share knowledge, and are open to changes and new ways of doing things.
The business builds long-lasting relationships with employees, suppliers, providers, and customers.
What it’s not
Lean is a lot of things — it’s a philosophy; a set of principles; a language (complete with its own jargon and acronyms); a management strategy; a methodology; a set of techniques, behaviors, tools, and even specialty software — all of which support this notion of reducing waste and delivering long-term customer value. Lean is often associated with other process improvement programs and initiatives, and in particular it is frequently paired with Six Sigma (more on this later in this chapter). And Lean, as a way of thinking and behaving, can be part of many initiatives.
So Lean is a lot of things. But there are a number of things that it isn’t:
Lean isn’t consulting foo-foo dust. It’s not just a bunch of manager-speak, arcane mapping sessions, or feel-good teaming exercises sprinkled with hoity-sounding Japanese terms. Lean is a well-grounded, mature, and very real framework for developing and sustaining performance excellence.
Lean isn’t onerous. Unlike most other process improvement initiatives, Lean does not require large investments in training or expensive software; nor does it call for a prescriptive, one-size-fits-all formulaic rollout. It requires top-down senior-management support, but Lean can begin in a small group and expand naturally as it grows and as the business needs it. This ease-of-adoption is why Lean has been so successful in small and medium-sized companies, and in operating units of large companies.
Lean isn’t overly analytical and statistical. Certain difficult challenges will always require deep analysis to characterize, understand, and solve. But the vast majority of Lean improvements are brought about by very simple and straightforward exercises, observation, and activities that anyone can understand and apply.
Lean isn’t a flash in the pan. It emerged from longstanding practices, characterized and understood by researchers who were observing what makes certain businesses work better. Although some Lean concepts might sound counterintuitive at first — and are very much counter to how many organizations are run — the tools and techniques of Lean have been around for decades and are fully complementary to long-standing proven methods.
Lean isn’t a Western-style system. Take note of this key point: Lean may be verymuch different from what you’re used to. Unlike most Western-style tools and techniques, Lean is not a quick-hit, big-bang, upside-the head, technology-enabled, silver-bullet solution to fix yesterday’s problems right now, today. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Lean is a continuous, long-term, everyday approach to building the flexibility and adaptability that enables you to address tomorrow’s challenges as they happen. Kaizen events and Lean projects often reap significant near-term benefits, but don’t look to Lean as an overnight sensation. Lean is very much a long-term deal.
What makes Lean so special?
Organizations worldwide have a plethora of choices when considering approaches to both their tactical and strategic pressures and challenges. Lean is one of many, many options. Why is it so popular?
Companies, organizations, and government entities all know that they must do something — they can’t just sit still. Gone are the days of doing things the same old way and being successful regardless — or of just being smart and hoping for the best. Aggressive, unrelenting global pressures are forcing everyone to embrace some type of approach and strategy for performance management and improvement. It’s now a given that you’re going to do something to improve — so what’s it going to be?
The Lean approach is increasingly popular, because it offers organizations a sensible, proven, and accessible path to long-term success. Unlike so many of the alternatives, Lean is something that everyone can understand, everyone can do, and everyone can benefit from:
Lean is proven. The principles and techniques of Lean have been practiced successfully by thousands of organizations of every type and size in every industry worldwide, spearheaded by nearly 50 years of continuous improvement by one of the world’s most successful corporations.
Lean makes sense. In an era of mind-boggling complexity, Lean is a solid foundation for addressing all kinds of challenges — simply. Lean is broadly applicable in any situation, combining old-world logic and reason with new-world tools and constraints.
Lean is accessible. Make no mistake: The performance improvement industry is big business. All those pundits, purveyors, and progenitors out there aren’t motivated by strictly altruistic intentions. Most of the performance improvement alternatives in the marketplace are big-ticket items, tailor-made for big wallets — and the big egos that carry them. Not Lean. Lean is accessible to anyone, with any budget. Lean is a serious commitment but isn’t particularly expensive, exclusive, or difficult.
Lean is inclusive. The Lean framework is purposely open and embraces tools and techniques known to solve problems. Lean is fully complementary with the tools of TQM, TPM, Six Sigma, and BPM, for example, so it’s not an either/or decision (see “Lean and Its Continuous Process Improvement Cousins,” later in this chapter, for more on these tools). Using Lean as a foundation, all the quality, performance, and technology tools still apply.
Lean is for everyone. Many performance improvement solutions are strictly tailored for specialty disciplines, requiring advanced skills and knowledge. Not Lean. Lean is so powerful in part because it is so easily learned and applied by everyone. No one is excluded.
The Lean Pedigree
While the specific assembly of principles and practices known as Lean date from the late 1980s, the origins of Lean are much older. Lean has a deep pedigree. Historians cite King Henry III of France in 1574 watching the Venice Arsenal build complete galley ships in less than an hour using continuous-flow processes. In the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin established principles regarding waste and excess inventory and Eli Whitney developed interchangeable parts. In the late 19th century, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth pioneered the modern-day understanding of motion efficiency as it related to work. In the early 20th century, Frederic Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management, introduced the concepts of standardized work and best-practices. (The legendary Shigeo Shingo cites Taylor’s 1911 seminal work Principles of Scientific Management as his inspiration.)
However, it was in Henry Ford’s revolutionary mass-production assembly plants where many practices first emerged. In 1915, Charles Buxton Going, in the preface to Arnold and Faurote’s Ford Methods and the Ford Shops, observed:
Ford’s success has startled the country, almost the world, financially, industrially, mechanically. It exhibits in higher degree than most persons would have thought possible the seemingly contradictory requirements of true efficiency, which are: constant increase of quality, great increase of pay to the workers, repeated reduction in cost to the consumer. And with these appears, as at once cause and effect, an absolutely incredible enlargement of output reaching something like one hundred fold in less than ten years, and an enormous profit to the manufacturer.
Ford also explicitly understood many of the forms of waste and the concepts of value-added time and effort.
New practices were later developed during the industrial buildups that preceded and then supported World War II, both in the United States and Japan. In the United States, quality leaders like W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran refined management and statistical concepts in support of war production. The Training within Industry (TWI) Service formalized practices in management, training, and production, while emphasizing methods and relationships. In postwar Japan, Deming and Juran worked with Japanese industrial leaders to apply these practices to reconstruction.
Toyoda and Ohno
The Toyoda Automatic Loom Works was founded by Sakichi Toyoda in 1926, where he pioneered the practice of jidoka (see Chapter 2). Ten years later, the company changed its name to Toyota and Toyoda’s son, Kiichiro, and engineer nephew, Eiji, began producing automobiles with parts from General Motors. Japan’s entry into World War II in 1941 diverted its efforts to truck production; during postwar reconstruction, the company nearly went bankrupt.
Meanwhile, Ford regularly invited managers and engineers from around the world to visit Ford plants and observe his mass-production systems. In the spring of 1950, Eiji Toyoda participated in an extended three-month visit to Ford’s famed Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan. At that time, the Rouge plant was largest and most complex manufacturing facility in the world. Toyota was producing about 2,500 cars a year; Ford was producing nearly 8,000 a day.
Eiji returned to Japan, and with Toyota’s production manager, Taiichi Ohno, concluded that Ford’s system of mass production would not work for them in Japan. The domestic Japanese automotive market was too small and too diversified — ranging from compact cars to luxury executive vehicles and a variety of trucks. In addition, the postwar native Japanese workforce was not willing to work under the same substandard conditions as the immigrant force in the United States. And the capital outlay for facilities and equipment was too high. Toyoda and Ohno set out to develop an entirely new means of production, including engineering, manufacture, supply, assembly, and workforce management.
The Toyota Production System
The Toyota Production System is so famous that it’s referred to simply by its abbreviation: TPS. TPS is perhaps the most studied system of production and operations management in the world. Countless companies have visited Toyota and observed TPS in action. Dozens of books have chronicled its successes and hailed its methods.
TPS is the birthplace of Lean. Lean Manufacturing, in particular, is essentially a repackaging of the Toyota Production System. Most of the philosophy and tenets, as well as the methods, techniques, and tools of Lean are all found within TPS. What those MIT researchers examined in 1988 and called Lean was, basically, TPS. The terms Lean Manufacturing and the Toyota Production System are effectively synonymous.
TPS was principally architected by cousins Eiji and Kiichiro Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno. History credits Ohno as the Father of TPS. He led its development, extension to the supply base, and integration with global partners from the early 1950s through the 1980s. By the time Lean was introduced to U.S. manufacturing, Toyota had been evolving and applying TPS successfully for over 40 years.
Toyota built the first model House of TPS (see Figure 1-1), depicting graphically that Toyota’s quality sets on the combination of just-in-time, built-in quality, and highly motivated people. All of this stands on a foundation of operational stability and Kaizen, bolstered by visual management and standardized work.
Figure 1-1: The TPS House — a high-level view of the Toyota Production System.
Most of the concepts presented in this book — and any book on Lean — are based on TPS implicitly. You won’t necessarily know when some Lean principle or practice is based on TPS, but it’s all there. As examples, the just-in-time concepts were developed at Toyota; jidoka was invented by Sakichi Toyoda; the seven forms of waste is a Toyota creation. So is Value-Stream Mapping. So, if you assume that everything in a Lean treatise is basically TPS, you’ll be mostly right.
Lean and Its Continuous Process Improvement Cousins
We’ve been awash in business and process improvement programs for decades. It’s been an alphabet soup of initiatives. Remember TQM, BPR, MBOs, and QITs? Well, now we also have the likes of TPM, TOC, GMP, QRM, ISO, Six Sigma, and BPM. They’re all part of continuous process improvement (CPI). It’s all very confusing — somewhat on purpose!
Because all these initiatives, methodologies, and “systems” focus on the same basic issues, they have a lot in common. They share some of the same tools and techniques. They claim similar results. But they also have significant differences — critical differences — in focus, scope, application, investment, and return.
Total Quality Management (TQM)
Total Quality Management (TQM) is an umbrella strategy for a quality-driven organization. TQM calls for quality to act as the driving force behind an organization’s entire leadership, design, planning, and improvement efforts. Developed in the 1970s as an amalgam of the different quality movements and approaches in the United States, Europe, and Japan, interest in TQM peaked in the early 1990s.
Total Quality Management focuses on culture and organization. The cultural element demands a quality perspective in all aspects of the company’s operations. Like other initiatives, TQM emphasizes a customer orientation, commitment from top management, continuous improvement, fact-based decision making, fast response, and employee participation. All the quality and statistical-analysis tools are applicable under TQM.
TQM has been applied in manufacturing, education, government, and service industries, with mixed success. As a broad culture-oriented initiative, it is challenged by the lack of a focused implementation methodology and direct measurable results.
Lean, like TQM, can act as the umbrella strategy for a corporation. Lean incorporates TQM principles and practices.
Six Sigma
Six Sigma emerged in the mid-1990s, self-proclaimed as “the world’s greatest problem-solving methodology.” With a well-defined implementation, training, and management framework, Six Sigma gave form and focus to the application of quality tools and techniques — and has delivered staggering bottom-line results.
Six Sigma was first developed as an internal quality initiative at Motorola, which won the inaugural U.S. Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award in 1988 as a result. Six Sigma hit the national stage following its successful adoption by General Electric in 1996. Ten years later, over two-thirds of the global Fortune 500 companies practice Six Sigma in some form, and the estimated combined savings now well exceeds $100 billion!
Six Sigma is a way to identify and control variation in the processes that most affect performance and profits. Following a prescriptive methodology, trained practitioners known as Black Belts analyze root cause and implement corrective action. (Many of the tools of Six Sigma are common to Lean.) Black Belt projects typically take four to six months and can return hundreds of thousands of dollars in value — and more. Six Sigma techniques, and its famous Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC) problem-solving methodology, are applicable within a Lean framework as a subordinate toolset for eliminating waste from defects and reducing process variance. (Read Six Sigma For Dummies, by Craig Gygi, Neil DeCarlo, and Bruce Williams, and the Six Sigma Workbook For Dummies, by Craig Gygi, Bruce Williams, and Terry Gustafson [both published by Wiley], to find out everything you need to know about Six Sigma.)
You may have heard of the terms Lean Six Sigma or sometimes Lean Sigma. Be careful here. These purport to be a natural combination of the two methods, to bring you the best of both worlds. What many of the Six Sigma consultants have done, in fact, is to cherry-pick a few Lean tools — particularly pull techniques and waste-reduction tools — and subordinate them into the Six Sigma deployment framework. Although this certainly extends the power and capabilities of Six Sigma, it’s not Lean. In particular, these other methods tend to neglect the people and cultural elements, the accessibility and inclusiveness, and the everyday Kaizen.
Theory of Constraints (TOC)
Theory of Constraints (TOC) is based on the premise that productivity (or the rate of revenue generation) is always limited at the point of at least one constraining process — a bottleneck. Only by increasing throughput at the bottleneck process can overall throughput be increased. TOC is sometimes referred to as constraint management.
TOC focuses on removing the constraints that limit an organization’s performance from achieving its full potential. TOC, with its emphasis on process flow and waste reduction, is an effective toolset for Lean practitioners in examining bottlenecks in the value stream. TOC is particularly useful with its focus on throughput.
Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)
Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a value-added maintenance concept. TPM has been implemented as a standalone process in manufacturing environments, as a foundational strategy of TPS, or as the maintenance component of a TQM program. TPM focuses on maintenance as an integral part of the business. The goal is to minimize emergency and unscheduled maintenance by converting to planned maintenance activities. TPM evolved from TQM and is proven as an effective foundational methodology within a Lean framework.
ISO-9000
ISO 9000 is a family of standards for quality management systems. ISO 9000 was developed from the British Standards Institution’s BS 5750 and is now maintained by the International Standards Organization (ISO) and administered by accreditation and certification bodies. Interest in ISO 9000 peaked in the late 1990s.
ISO 9000 does not guarantee the quality of end products and services; rather, it certifies that consistent business processes are being applied. Standardized work defined in Lean organizations becomes the basis upon which ISO 9000 procedures are defined.
Business Process Management (BPM)
The term Business Process Management (BPM) refers to activities performed by businesses to optimize and adapt their formal processes — particularly those processes controlled by automated systems. BPM is often most directly associated with technology and software systems that implement extensive integration and management of process data and information. BPM includes process modeling, data integration, workflow, and business activity monitoring (known as BAM). BPM is a significant enabler for Lean, and directly facilitates Lean goals and practices. BPM practices include:
Modeling tools help define and categorize standardized work.
Data-integration capabilities capture critical supplier, inventory, cycle time, status, delivery, and other value-stream characterization parameters.
Activity-monitoring tools regularly check the performance of processes against control limits, alerting people or other processes if key indicators trend improperly.
BPM is the systems counterpart to Lean, facilitating Lean solutions in technology.
Chapter 2
The Foundation and Language of Lean
In This Chapter
Understanding the foundation of Lean
Identifying the seven forms of waste
If you’ve ever sojourned to a foreign place, you’ve experienced culture shock first hand. At first the new land seems strange — the food, the customs and the language, even if they speak your native tongue. Delicacies in one land may not be so delectable in another. Greetings can be confusing: Do you bow, kiss, or shake hands?
If you ask for directions, the natives may look at you as though you’re crazy or give you seemingly nonsensical information. Part of the issue is that you have no context for the foundations and language of the culture. With time, and information, you assimilate into the new place. You start to learn some basic greetings and phrases, practice daily customs, and, eventually, with persistence and diligence, become more like a native.
