5 Common Misconceptions About Lean
| by Steve Flick | ||||
Lean is defined by at least one manufacturer as a philosophical approach to business, based on “satisfying customers by making exactly what they need, with the level of quality they need, when they need it, in the amount they need, while using a minimal amount of material, equipment, space, labor, and time.”
Sounds like the way every company ought to be managed, doesn’t it? Some companies have used lean with great success, yet many companies still don’t use lean principles, aren’t aware of what lean is, and don’t want to get involved with it.
Why is that? Well, what do we know about lean?
Lean Is All About Manufacturing
True, lean is rooted in manufacturing. The best known example of lean is the Toyota Production System, or TPS. Toyota has not limited its lean system to manufacturing, either. They’ve applied it to other functions, which has largely led to its success in lean. They recognize that siloing, or segregating, business functions is a major driver of waste. Yet somehow, siloing persists in business.
Siloing breeds inefficient or no communication. Therefore, siloing is responsible for at least three types of muda (waste) — delay, duplication, and unnecessary motion. Manufacturing has to be coordinated with sales, marketing, accounting, HR, and every other functional area, and vice versa. It wouldn’t do much good to have lean operations in one area and not in the others.
By all means, start small to increase your chances of success. Once you’ve had that first success, it’s easier to farm the concept of lean out to other areas of your business.
Lean Is Hot Now, But It’ll Cool Off
Lean is not a new practice or tool. Lean has been practiced at least since the early part of the 20th century. Frederick W. Taylor, often called the Father of Scientific Management, wrote “Principles of Scientific Management” in 1911, which became a sort of bible for manufacturers. Japanese manufacturing used, and refined, many of the principles of lean to reestablish itself after World War II.
Based on the success of lean in Japan, it took root around the world, though with limited success. Companies that didn’t have the level of success with lean that Toyota and others experienced didn’t apply its principles holistically, or felt they couldn’t wait for a long-term payoff.
Lean has proved itself around the world for decades, and interest in lean seems to be increasing. For instance, Google Trends shows interest in “lean production” spiking last quarter and a growing interest in “lean management” over the last couple of years.
The Company Will Expect Me To Do More With Less
Lean has nothing to do with increasing the pace of work. Rather, it has everything to do with increasing productivity, coordinating processes, and eliminating waste. The objective in lean is not to speed up work but to even out the flow of work — remove delays and other kinds of waste that we’ve always thought were inherent but aren’t. The company may be looking for increased productivity, but speed does not equate to productivity, or quality.
Lean Advocates Don’t Use The Same Language We Do
Lean comes down to two objectives — increase value and eliminate waste. Every tool and technique, every theory and principle boils down to value and waste. What activities — in the customer’s view — contribute value to your products? What activities, or steps in the process, add nothing of value but raise your costs? Value stream mapping, kaizen, kanban, muda, and all the other terminology isn’t nearly as strange as not improving processes.
Lean Is Time Consuming And Costly To Implement And Maintain
Any time you begin a new (to you) way of doing things, you have to expect that not everything will go according to plan from the outset. However, once you’re past the “break-in period” with lean, you begin to realize its benefits. Lean is identifying and eliminating waste — improving the flow of processes.
Lean is a philosophy that ties together ideas and practices. Lean isn’t expensive tools and equipment. Eliminating waste frees capacity. This, in turn, obviates the need for more office space, more equipment, and more facilities. When done correctly, lean saves much more over a lifetime than it costs to implement. Lean continues to pay for itself.
To summarize, lean is not…
- Just for manufacturing;
- A fad that management will easily pick up and discard;
- Going to force you to do more with less;
- Some obtuse concept practiced by wizards in pointy hats; nor is it
- Costly and time consuming.
Do you have experiences with lean that you’d like to share? Did you have any misconceptions that were erased once you started using lean?
Categories:
Lean Six Sigma Quality
Tags:
lean implementation • lean journey • lean thinking • process improvement
Bizmanualz has been at the forefront of deploying business best practices since 1995 delivering Policies, Procedures and Forms; quality systems implementation; and strategic business process improvement to help business owners achieve the growth and expansion they envision.
Learn more about Bizmanualz solutions:
Originally published in 2010 by Bizmanualz, Inc. under the title 5 Common Misconceptions About Lean. All rights reserved. Reproduction permitted with attribution only. www.bizmanualz.com
4 Responses to “5 Common Misconceptions About Lean”
Leave Your Comment
May 25th, 2010 at 7:55 pm
i’m not sure how many of your mail recipients actually respond. if they are like me they read and digest those articles of interest and forget about you until the next one. not very satisfying for you i imagine! let me say thank you for what i receive – i file your articles and really appreciate the work and thought that goes into writing them
cheers
d
May 26th, 2010 at 11:42 am
Thanks for commenting, David. You’re right — the “conversation” is awfully one-sided most of the time. Is there a particular topic or category you’d like to see us cover?
February 23rd, 2011 at 8:58 am
This is an interesting article; however, I cannot accept you concept on companies who engage ‘lean’ practices not wanting to shorten the bench and go with fewer lines. I have just moved throught this with four companies, the military, a defence contractor, an aircraft production company, and my current employer.
Lean is supposed to be a method of increasing production, but all of these companies are only looking at the bottom line, the dollar, and how to increase that amount while reducing payroll, the biggest expense most companies carry. Greed will always push the good intention of companies aside when they go down the road of lean. I am not a fan of the lean culture as it is usually entered by management for the wrong reasons.
The last company I worked for is going down the road to destruction: they have “Kaizen blitzes” all the time but they spoon-feed the staff and do not listen to input from the floor. They say they will accept staff suggestions but only do so as long as they represent the vision of management.
They want to reduce payroll to improve profit per aircraft built and they want them built in so many days. I have argued with them that the math does not add up. When I ran the stats, we came up 5,000 man-hours short for the target date of building one complete aircraft a month (21 days as they don’t work weekends) and they still want more with less.
Lean could be a good thing. I like the concept but 31 years of aviation industry experience has proved the opposite, that greed will always win the day.
But, yes – I like your articles.
February 26th, 2011 at 6:32 pm
Any tool can be applied poorly and produce the wrong results. Is this the tools fault? It is human nature to blame the messenger, or in the is case, lean. But I have also seen how lean can be applied well to an organization to produce significant time savings. The problem is not with lean it is with management and how those time savings are applied. If management chooses to harvest those savings then this will be a one time gain. If those savings are invested back in the business then you will a process of continuous improvement that will produce a long lasting competitive advantage.