Stability is the Foundation

I want to start this blog with a quote from Art Smalley. He is one of the 'Lean' experts that I greatly respect for his focus on execution. He writes on lean as if he were a company owner rather than a professor discussing theories or a consultant trying to sell something. It is from an article on Superfactory titled: Creating Basic Stability (find the article at www.superfactory.com).

Toyota has been reluctant to publish or even endorse what they consider to be the right way to implement lean. Their reluctance is well taken given our inherent human tendency to look for an easy way out or cut and paste answers from elsewhere. Toyota executives have always maintained that TPS/lean is a system of thinking and that practitioner’s can best “learn by doing.”

When pressed, however, veterans of Toyota comment that certain pre-conditions are needed for a lean implementation to proceed smoothly. These include relatively few problems in equipment uptime, available materials with few defects, and strong supervision at the production line level. And these are precisely the problems that I see manufacturers still struggling with today.

He goes on to discuss how Basic Stability should be considered the first step in a Lean transformation or even a precursor to attempting to become Lean. What gain can be had from jumping straight to Kanban sizing when poor quality raw materials are driving increased inventory? How can you create flow when machines continually break down? How long will improved performance as a result of Kaizen and standard work last when first line supervision isn't creating disciplined people and disciplined processes to maintain the gains?

This starts to get to the heart of this blog. It's putting the cart before the horse by jumping straight to the 'sexy' tools of Lean rather than understanding that a foundation for success needs to be in place. That foundation is not necessarily unique to Lean either. Not every great company is Lean and not every (or even all that many...) Lean companies are great. So why are some more successful than others?