Where We Need to Go, The Way Ahead: What Lean IS and ISN'T

This is part two of the series on Where We Need to Go...


What lean IS and what it isn’t


In 1996, almost 15 years ago, Jim Womack wrote a book.  The book was a follow up to his first book, The Machine That Changed the World.  This then new book, Lean Thinking, was really the book that would change the face of manufacturing for a long time.  I credit Jim Womack with being the granddaddy of what we in North America call “lean”.   Womack coined the phrase as he tried to describe how some really good manufacturers and one really great manufacturer did their business, particularly their production operations.  Womack says that in 1987 he and his research team were sitting in front of a white board thinking about a name for the “new” business system that they had observed at Toyota and its emulators.  One of the team suggested that they call it what is was: a way to serve the customer’s needs with less of everything...why don’t we call it lean?  And, so, it began.


In various times and in various places, Womack reduced lean to a few key principles.  They were: 


 Determine value defined by the customer
 Create end to end processes to make nothing but that value (value streams)
 If you are working with an existing process, eliminate the waste in the process


So, it follows, that seeing the waste in the value stream would be important, hence Value Stream Mapping. Once you find the waste, you need to do stuff to eliminate it, hence the onset of “lean tools”.  The tools were the things that you could observe as you watched Toyota doing their thing.  The tools were also easy to package up and sell to a willing and hungry public.  One of the problems that arises, though, is that you can't see everything in a system, especially the hearts and minds of the people in the system...