November 8, 2013

Nightmare on Target Street

Many organisations still use productivity targets as a main tool for managing processes even though this approach has been pretty comprehensively rubbished in the literature. So what’s going on? The trouble is that managing by output targets is easy – you know how many people and resources you have, and it is easy to work

September 27, 2013

Standing in the Circle

Anyone who has read anything about the Toyota Production System is likely to have read about Taiichi Ohno making new engineers stand in a circle in the workplace, for hours on end, to identify waste in the process. Personally the image that this story creates in my mind has always horrified me – how humiliating!

September 4, 2013

Lean in the UK – in the 1920’s

This blog is an edited version of the Wikipedia entry on Frank George Woollard the British engineer who established something very like the lean production system at Morris Motors Ltd. It makes interesting reading about this little-known aspect of the history of lean. In 1923 Frank George Woollard led the re-organisation of engine production

July 30, 2013

The “Standard Lean Approach” – An Oxymoron

[The consultants] “mapped processes, timed processes with stopwatches, pored over data and developed a set of recommended changes. … Within nine months the changes had been made and 30 per cent productivity improvements were booked – many people had lost their jobs. Throughput was improved, so more products reached customers on time, although quality problems

May 11, 2013

“Doing” Lean

I overheard a conversation recently that chilled me to the bone. One manager, speaking to another on the telephone, said “we need to decide whether we’re doing six-sigma, lean or systems thinking”. It wasn’t so much that idea that there is a shopping list of business philosophies that senior managers pick and choose from

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Nightmare on Target Street

Standing in the Circle

Lean in the UK – in the 1920’s

The “Standard Lean Approach” – An Oxymoron

“Doing” Lean