Supply Chain View

At a seminar I ran earlier this week for CILT, this is a paraphrasing of what one of the delegates said to me:

“Lean is all about cost reduction. It focuses on the internal processes of the company. It does not think about the customer.”

It is now over 60 years since Toyoda Kiichiro, then president of Toyota, told his company to “catch up with America in three years – otherwise the automobile industry will not survive”. Along with others, Taiichi Ohno – who quotes Kiichiro in The Toyota Production System – took up this challenge and the rest,as they say, is Lean history.

Seminar comments

So I was surprised at some of the comments I received in an open discussion at this week’s seminar. One of the themes of the seminar was that we were trying to move on from a long-running business school debate about the relative merits Lean and Agility in supply chains. In the UK this sees Dan Jones and Cardiff in the Lean corner, and Martin Christopher and Cranfield in the Agile corner.

As an introduction I presented a session on the historical context (from craft production to Ford and mass production by way of Adam Smith and Eli Witney) followed by an overview of Lean. There is only so much you can say in 12 slides, but it was a fair summary of context, key proponents and the main themes.

We followed with a review of thinking on Agility, starting with a brainstorming exercise on how the delegates perceived the differences in approach with Lean. This is where I picked up the comments quoted above. I must stress that the delegate was professional and generally well-informed – the comments were a genuine response to his own experiences of Lean in his workplace and from what he had read or been told.

Define value for the customer

This was my response: Lean begins and ends with the customer. Lean aims to remove waste, or muda – but waste is defined as precisely that which does not provide value to the customer. So if we are going to remove waste, we need to start by understanding exactly what is the value for the customer.

This is Womack & Jones’s first Lean principle. The famous Seven Wastes are an aide memoire – they were set down to remind us of all the forms that waste might take and that we might overlook.

So I wonder: how well understood is Lean? The poor implementations and mangled explanations seem to have damaged general understanding. I have no problem with informed criticism of the Lean approach – surely the Lean emphasis on continuous striving for improvement should lead to some critical evaluation of Lean itself. But I think Lean practitioners should be aware of the widespread incidence of “Lean misconceptions” and place a premium on clear communication on the why of Lean.