The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production, James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos. HarperCollins, 1991.
This book is the story of lean production in the automobile industry, which the authors see as the successor of mass production, which was the successor of the craft industry. Taiichi Ohno of Toyota is one of the key figures associated with this transformation.
“The truly lean plant has two key organizational features: it transfers the maximum number of tasks and responsibilities to those workers actually adding value to the line, and it has in place a system for detecting defects that quickly traces every problem, once discovered, to its ultimate cause.” (p.99)
They go on to describe the “five whys” – keep asking why enough times to get to root causes.
Techniques of Lean Design
- Leadership: “Shusa” – large project leader. The (large, cross-functional) team lead has people reporting to them, i.e., they’re in charge, not “coordinators.”
- Teamwork: tightly knit teams
- Communication: Confront conflicts directly. The team pledges to follow the group’s decisions. “All the relevant specialties are present, and the shusa’s job is to force the group to confront all the difficult tradeoffs they’ll have to make to agree on the project.”
- Simultaneous Development: anticipation and approximation. Usually turns out OK, but if the anticipation is wrong they put the correction on a fast track.
“But what is it about this system [intimate relationship with suppliers] that allows an interchange of such sensitive information to take place? The answer is simple. The system works because a rational framework exists for determining costs, price, and profits. This framework makes the two parties want to work together for mutual benefit, rather than look upon one another with suspicion.” (p.148)
Lean supply uses a cost tracking approach: establish a target price, then work backwards to figure out how to make it with reasonable profit for suppliers. “In other words, it is a ‘market price minus’
system rather than a ‘supplier plus cost’ system.” Two additional techniques are value engineering (done by working backward to identify the cost of each stage of production) and value analysis (cost reduction by cutting cost-critical steps).
“When setup times have been honed […] and where production runs are frequent, short, and uninterrupted, cost estimators do not have to wait around for days or weeks to average the performance over several
production runs.” (p.149)
Lean production: “This mode of production achieves its highest efficiency, quality, and flexibility when all activities from design to assembly occur in the same place. As a senior Honda executive recently remarked, ‘We wish we could design, engineer, fabricate, and assemble the entire car in one large room, so that everyone involved could be in face-to-face contact with everyone else.'”
Automobile production is clearly not XP, but the parallels are interesting. (Reviewed Nov., ’02)