Inside Lean

I’m not sure exactly when the metamorphosis happened, but I indelibly remember when I started reading that JIT (Just-in-time) was an inventory management system. To make matters worse, Production Planning and Purchasing managers were saving their companies very large bucks by moving their inventories to the books of their suppliers. Wasn’t this great! Instant cash! And some managers were really brilliant in that their future inventories were now in a supplier owned warehouse just across the street from them. This…

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In my last post I discussed the critical role that “time” plays in forming the underlying basis and foundation of the Lean philosophy. The effectiveness of process flows can be best measured by time. Flow itself is a time based metric. And all process waste is, first and foremost, a waste of time. Thus “time” is a (if not the) crucial factor in making TPS/Lean work. But how do you make time visible? If improvements are based on improving process…

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Let’s revisit two age-old adages: “Time is money” “Take the time to do it right” Put these two together and you get to the age-old manufacturing belief that the higher the quality, the higher the cost. You must do things faster to reduce cost, but the faster you do it the higher the chance that a mistake will be made. The slower you do it the less chance of a mistake, but the cost will increase. And this was accepted…

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