Lean Transformation

[Daniel McCrobie]

Greetings! I am looking forward to attending this year's event and think that this is a great idea for a sharing of ideas.

I have been working on an idea that I need help with.

I was last associated with an express and logistics company. I had worked for them for about a year and a half and we had no lean transformation of any kind. If anything, the process improvements that were made are even more cumbersome than not have improvements done in the first place. I have been reflecting on what I could have done differently to influence that company to embrace lean concepts.

I was recently reading an article on Taiichi Ohno and his trek to implement what we now know of as the Toyota Production System. Many don't realize that it took about 25 years to get a full Lean Transformation into Toyota. Ohno was the supervisor of the machine shop and it took him 8 years just to get things working in that area.

With all of the speed and efficiency that surrounds the essence of lean, why does it take so long and it is so perilous at the beginning? Do you think it is possible to use the lessons learned at one facility and then implement them at another, without the growing pains that seem to be common with today's service and manufacturing.

I just thought I would throw that out there. I would love to hear about how you are implementing lean at your facility.

[Bill French]

Daniel:

I'm certainly not an expert on "lean transformation", but I think a lot of folks confuse "lean" with "agile"; e.g., it's possible to create lean systems that lack agility, and agile systems that aren't very lean. When I think of the term "lean" I think of the general philosophy of Rails (i.e., less is more).

At MyST we designed a very agile platform, but I wouldn't consider it "lean" necessarily per-se. However, because it's able to be put to use solving some tough (and big) problems with little effort, IT consultants see it as "lean" - perhaps a misunderstanding, or maybe not.

Recently we bid a large project (7 figures annually) for a large university which wanted about 250 very advance blogsite applications deployed to their research groups. They needed a unified design, deployment, and maintenance approach that also supported a common search and knowledge-tagging facility across all 250 sites. Each site (conceptually the marketing advertorial for a research group) requires up to 10 separate blogs each and many other features including private intelligence gathering on user-defined subjects and competitors.

The MyST Platform is a blogsite factory capable of building, deploying, integrating, and maintaining hundreds of such sites from a common blueprint. Consultants for the university thought we had designed a "lean factory" system, but it was only "lean" from the context of effort required to configure, start, and operate the factory. The technology itself is fairly comprehensive (the opposite of lean?) and includes a good deal of automation and XML integration technology.

I think the MyST Platform represents a "lean factory" methodology because we can easily reprogram what the factory is building with great agility and very quickly. However, the platform required four years of development to get it to the stage where it is able to meet such requirements.

>>> why does it take so long and it is so perilous at the beginning?

Two words (perhaps); systems architecture? ;-)

>>> Do you think it is possible to use the lessons learned at one facility and then implement them at another, without the growing pains that seem to be common with today's service and manufacturing.

Sure, but only of the lean systems were designed to be agile.

Disclaimer - seriously - I know zip about "lean" anything; I just build shit that works and is based on clear, rational thinking. ;-)

-- bf