As a Manufacturing Advisory Service Champion (MAS), I had the delight of seeing various implementations. There was no doubt that the experts were very competent at Lean.
Unfortunately they forgot that there isn’t a good process that people can’t make worse, or a bad process that people can’t make work.
I watched a competent Lean implementation in a large SME, and every visit I asked the same question: Are your people involved in this?
The Operations Director always assured me. But that wasn’t the vibration I got when we walked round the factory. It felt like a group of booted and suited managers totally divorced from the employees.
Needless to say, the implementation failed, and the company collapsed.
I did ask the Lean experts to look at my operation before we did Lean ourselves.
Their recommendations ignored the realities. Worse than that, they wouldn’t listen! They were fixated by the purity of the approach. Yes, I know that Lean is sometimes to do with blowing up roadblocks. But politics is difficult!
When we took up a Lean approach ourselves, we solved more bottlenecks, even after years of process development. It is a powerful technique. We kicked ourselves for not doing it earlier. It was so visible now. We hadn’t been slouches in raising productivity before either!
Lower work in progress is a touchstone of Lean. We set a three day work in progress, say 6000 units.
After a week we ground to a halt because 60% of the units were in Design due to those pesky parameters again. If you are going to become Lean you have to be sure your process works well and everyone will Lean in with you!
Lean reaches parts of the organization that other change processes bypass.
Be ready for the political battles and get a top-level sponsor in your organization.