10th Lean Manufacturing Conference Wroclaw, Poland

June 22, 2010

Lean for the Long Term

James P. Womack Chairman, Lean Enterprise Institute

Ive Been At This For 30 Years

Thinking about lean how people work together to create pure value with no waste. Recently Ive been reflecting on: Where we have been. Where we are now. Where we are going & what we need to do.

After Ten Years (1990)

The Machine That Changed the World was published. The transition from mass to lean looked like it might be fast and easy, after a crisis in the next recession.

The Lean Enterprise

The MIT team and I had just written down the five elements of a lean enterprise:

Product & process development

Supplier management

Fulfillment from order to delivery/cash

Customer support

Enterprise management

All That Remained Was

Implementation! The subject of Lean Thinking: Value (purpose) Value stream (process)

Flow (process)
Pull (process)

Perfection (people)
After kaizen = purpose, process, people

After 30 Years
A realization that this is a long process!

Lean is simply the latest step in the long progression of process thinking.
Going back at least to the 1500s. A long arc of improvement with many waves.

Steps Along the Way

French Ordinance & interchangeable parts Taylor and Scientific Management

Ford and flow production

Training Within Industry Deming and the quality movement Total Quality Management Business Process Reengineering Six Sigma Lean (derived from Toyotas example)

The Pattern of History

Waves of improvement (all focused on achieving perfect value creating process): Based on tools Promoted through programs Led by improvement departments Often introduced by consultants

The Results
Every wave has subsided at some point.

Leaving the sea a bit higher but nowhere near the peak level of the movement.
It follows that lean could also fade away in the next ten years (and even fail?!) What would be the root cause?

The Problem of Management

We won the battle of tools & methods.

We are still losing the battle about the work of management.

While lean tools were being perfected modern management was evolving in a direction where they couldnt be used. The world thinks it needs more modern leaders when it needs more lean managers.

Modern Management
The managers we all work with every day, in our roles as earnest improvers, are the folks standing in the way of improvement. To take the next step on the lean journey we need to populate the world with lean managers! Weve done a good job of fixing processes but now we need to fix management.

Modern vs. Lean Managers

Vertical vs. horizontal. Authority vs. responsibility. Results vs. process. Planning from the top vs. PDCA. Weak line, strong staff vs. strong line, small staff. Formal education vs. gemba education. Remote decisions vs. go see, ask why, show respect.

Modern vs. Lean Managers

Problem solving by staff vs. problem solving by line in horizontal dialogue. Standardization by staff vs. standardization by work team. Go fast, jump to solutions vs. go slow, considering many alternatives. No problem is the solution vs. no problem is the problem.

Lean Managers
Start with customer purpose (value) Work backwards to create, sustain, and steadily improve the processes creating value.

Align and engage the people touching the processes (value streams) creating the value. Manage by process rather than by results.

The Work of Management

Align and engage through strategy deployment to determine what is important, what purposes will be pursued. Deploy, solve problems, and evaluate proposals with PDCA embedded in A3. Create and sustain basic stability in all processes through standardized work with standardized management. Create next generation of lean managers.

The Hard Part

The right lean management system for each organization in each industry in each country must be discovered through PDCA. As earnest improvers we have no authority for any proposed improvements in management systems except through PDCA. Which brings us to the topic of Toyota.

The Toyota Question

Why are we in the lean movement so discombobulated by the challenges Toyota is facing? Because we have for three decades been trailing in Toyotas wake, citing as our authority for every question: Heres what Toyota would do & they are always right!

The Toyota Answer

But this has never been how managers at Toyota claim authority for their actions. They manufacture their authority by taking responsibility through the hard work of PDCA in the context of A3 in dialogue with those touching processes causing problems. We now need to follow their example.

What Can You Do on Monday?

As you return home, have a conversation with your modern manager bosses.

Maybe our problem in achieving & sustaining improvement is our management system, not specific bad managers.
Can we do an A3 for our management system as a team activity improvers & leaders -- to agree on our current condition & how we need to change?

The Next 10 Years for Lean

As we move ahead to the next phase (wave?) of lean, lets do PDCA together on the best approaches to lean management and share our findings.

The Lean Enterprise Institute Polska & the Lean Global Network need to lead the way.