Lean Means Eliminating Waste
Getting “lean” has become a corporate buzzword. A corporate executive hearing
about the success of his competitors with a lean program might say to a sub-
ordinate, “We must get lean to survive in this competitive market. Go take a
course and get certified on this lean stuff and come back and do it.” If only it were
so easy. The subordinate, often a middle manager or engineer, goes through the
certification course, starts to sort out the bewildering array of terms like “kanban,”
“andon,” “jidoka,” “heijunka,” “takt time,” and on and on, and comes back
charged up and overwhelmed. “Where do I start?” he asks. “Our processes
don’t look like the case examples they used in class.”
Unfortunately, every process is different, and simply learning a template for
setting up a kanban system or building a cell may not transfer in a straightforward
way to your operation. Quite possibly a tool used by Toyota, as they use it, may
not even make sense in your environment. This leads many people to conclude
that “lean does not work here.”
When we hear this, we ask our students or clients to step back a bit. We might
both agree that building a supermarket and using kanban is not the solution.
But do not give up just yet. Let’s go back to first principles. The starting point
on creating a lean flow for us is Taiichi Ohno’s description, in 1988, of what he
was trying to accomplish:
All we are doing is looking at the time line from the moment the customer gives
us an order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing that time
line by removing the non-value-added wastes.Starting the Journey of
Waste Reduction
Chapter 3
Copyright © 2006 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Click here for terms of use.