Читать книгу Lean Six Sigma For Dummies - Martin Brenig-Jones - Страница 12

Lean thinking focuses on enhancing value for the customer by improving and smoothing the process flow (covered in Chapter 11) and eliminating waste (discussed in Chapter 10). Lean thinking has evolved since Henry Ford’s first production line, and much of the development has been led by Toyota through the Toyota Production System (TPS). Toyota built on Ford’s production ideas, moving from high volume, low variety, to high variety, low volume.

Although Lean thinking is usually seen as being a manufacturing concept and application, many of the tools and techniques were originally developed in service organizations. These include, for example, spaghetti diagrams, and the visual system used by supermarkets to replenish shelves. Indeed, it was a supermarket that helped shape the thinking behind the Toyota Production System. During a tour to General Motors and Ford, Kiichiro Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno visited Piggly Wiggly, an American supermarket, and noticed Just in Time and kanban being applied. This innovation enabled Piggly Wiggly customers to “buy what they need at any time” and avoided the store holding excess stock.

Kanban is a Japanese word meaning “card you can see.” At the Piggly Wiggly, it was a card that provided the signal to order more stock. You’ll see kanbans turning up again in Chapter 16 when we look at how Agile principles and approaches can be used to accelerate Lean Six Sigma projects.

Lean is called “Lean” not because things are stripped to the bone. Lean isn’t a recipe for your organization to slash its costs, although it will likely lead to reduced costs and better value for the customer. We trace the concept of the word “Lean” back to 1987, when John Krafcik (who later led Google’s self driving car project) was working as a researcher for MIT as part of the International Motor Vehicle Program. Krafcik needed a label for the TPS phenomenon that described what the system did. On a white board, he wrote the performance attributes of the Toyota system compared with traditional mass production. TPS:

 Needed less human effort to design products and services.

 Required less investment for a given amount of production capacity.

 Created products with fewer delivered defects.

 Used fewer suppliers.

 Went from concept to launch, order to delivery and problem to repair in less time and with less human effort.

 Needed less inventory at every process step.

 Caused fewer employee injuries.

Krafcik commented:

It needs less of everything to create a given amount of value, so let’s call it Lean.

And just like that, Lean was born.