Accidentally Aligned: Lean Purism, or Systemic Transformation?

Jim Womack wrote in his book, "Gemba Walks" about many of his learnings through the years. The book is an impressive view of lean from one who has certainly deployed it. One thing that Jim talks about in his earlier version of the book is that he started a lean bicycle company, and some of his users asked the question, "what happened to that factory and how did it turn out".

Jim shares his learnings from this adventure in staggering transparency and begins to draw some lines between lean purism, and lean deployment. If you don't have the book and want to read more about it, you can find the article that he wrote on it for free here:

https://www.lean.org/the-lean-post/articles/beach-reading/

This is what Jim shares with us:

"Then we made some mistakes: The first was a technical effort to create a completely flexible welding fixture for any bicycle so that the welders could switch over from one bike to the next practically instantly and we could run bikes through the plant in the exact sequence of customer orders. It was a splendid thing to behold – and lingers in my memory very much like Mark Twain’s mechanical typesetting machine that consumed his entire fortune and never worked! We were so obsessed with lean purism – in which I was determined to make bikes in the exact sequence of customer orders – that we forgot some technical limits and the fact that many of our customers were not actually that concerned about waiting a bit for their bike. Indeed, some reported that if we could make a custom bike within two days of receiving an order, we must not have any business or their bike was really taken from inventory rather than custom built. Either way, we were not delighting our customers, who, like Harley Davidson buyers, placed positive value on waiting. So…we purposely added two weeks of lead time to custom frames!"

This is one thing that is often missed in our deployment of lean transformation is the value that we are seeking to create. When we think of the entire system that we are adjusting, bringing all areas of that system to 100% is probably not what is best for creating value.

This is even more critical when the company is cash strapped, or lacking resources to work on lean initiatives. Time is our enemy when we are making change, which makes it very important to understand "to what end" we are doing something.

If I have a machine that is operating at 67% OEE, but producing to Takt time, that may be waste, but it may not be critical waste, if I have another machine at the next operation that is working at 74% OEE, but is not meeting Takt.

In fact, to add insult to injury, if I raise the OEE of the machine that is producing at 67% OEE, it will create excess inventory into the system, which is waste.

In addition to this, if the second machine was running to Takt, I might even ask the machine running at 67% OEE to decrease output, for the sake of the system.

In the end, we should be pursuing value, not excellence in the use of tools. When we pursue value, we will find waste, and in these moments, it is very important to make sure that are removing what needs to be removed, not just removing for the sake of being good at removing.

When we optimize a silo for the sake of seeking improvement, without consulting the system, we run the risk of over processing, which is one of the forms of waste.

Let's make tomorrow better than today.