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Is Lean the Dark Side of TPS?

Many so-called lean transformations are bodies without souls

Bruce Hamilton
Mon, 08/12/2013 - 09:56
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Body

I opened a fortune cookie yesterday, which read “Understanding little is better than misunderstanding a lot.” Seems to me that we lean wannabes misunderstand a lot—maybe not everyone, but I regretfully include myself in that group.

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There is so much to know about the Toyota Production System (TPS) that one lifetime of study and trial and error aren’t enough for most of us. I wonder sometimes if lean has become the abridged version of TPS, structured as a tack-on to existing policy and practice.

Key concepts like kaizen, for example, are reduced to buzzwords, and means are confused with ends (a concern voiced by Shigeo Shingo four decades ago.) After 40 years of kaizening, I notice that most organizations I visit still count the number of events to evaluate their lean transformations.

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Comments

Submitted by mgraban on Thu, 08/15/2013 - 10:44

Hmmmm.

Hi Bruce-

I see your point about people not really embracing Lean or TPS principles. But, I think headline is misleading... not all "Lean" efforts are bad and I'm sure there are people who say they are "implementing TPS" that have superficial tools-driven efforts.

I call the bad or misguided attempts you describe "L.A.M.E." - or Lean As Mistakenly Executed

There are many efforts labeled "Lean" that truly embrace the thinking and philosophy of TPS, as I'm sure you have seen.

Mark

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Submitted by Rajohnson on Thu, 08/15/2013 - 11:43

Gaikan vs Seishin

The words given to me many moons ago, early in my quest for knowledge of how to implement improvement.  

The translations I was given:

Gaikan = "look and feel" or facade

Seishin = "heart and soul" or spirit.

I dont know if these translations are correct, but the concept has burrowed into my psyche.  The simplicity and elegance of these words i think reflect what you are saying in your article.

Rich

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Submitted by RSchonberger on Fri, 08/16/2013 - 14:42

Lean as Dark Side?

Bruce: When I saw the title of your article, I wondered if I would agree with the content. I surely do, and I can think of more things going astray in contemporary lean practices. Prominently, the quest for lean efficiency (driving down flow times in operations) often shows up negatively in the form of increased customer lead times, backordering, distribution inventories, and empty shelves or overaged product at retail. Reasons: (1) The lean ideal of concurrent production (of many SKUs or customer orders) is being sacrified to make operational lean numbers look good. (2) Conventional, wrong-headed performance metrics--especially, utilization--are still alive, so that equipment is often too busy to respond to short-term customer demand variations. (3) Contributing to the mismatch between what's produced and what's needed is a new class of "monuments": one or few complex, costly, high-maintenance machines that consolidate production of many products or orders, vs. concurrent production in many simple, low-cost cells. (These points are among the content of a two-part article beginning in the fall issue of Target magazine, entitled, "Coping with Takt-Time Tyranny and Capacity Confusion.")

 

One quibbling point, though: I don't know that kaizen has Toyota roots. I checked the 15 or so books written about TPS and JIT during the 1980s, about half by Toyota/Japanese authors and the rest by Westerners: The word kaizen does not appear in the index of any of them. (Researching the point further is hampered by the disappearance of my copy of Imai's 1985 Kaizen book.) I'll leave it to others to trace kaizen more deeply. Regardless of its origins, kaizen/continuous improvement surely is a basic element of lean/JIT/TPS as well as TQC/TQM/TQ.

Nice article, Bruce!

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Submitted by Jim Beckham on Fri, 08/23/2013 - 11:19

In reply to Lean as Dark Side? by RSchonberger

Is Lean the Dark Side of TPS?

Bruce,

I agree with your article.  One time I visited one of our suppliers in India and the facility and layout was one of the best that I had seen in India.  During a tour, one of the things that I like to do is to have a shop floor operator explain to me what they are doing, including any visual clues used for managing the process.  Unfortunately, the shop floor operator could not speak English.  So instead, I slowly walked the production line to better understand (while my tour guide wathced).  I stopped to read the "Standard Work Instructions" when all of a sudden it occurred to me that I was reading their Standard Work Instructions - in English!  Management had posted them on the production line for my benefit, and not for the benfit of the shop floor operator.

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