As I promised I continued to refresh my knowledge on Lean, which incorporates 5S, Kanban, Kaizen, and some other principles and has its roots in the Toyota Production System (interestingly the name „Lean” is not of Japanese origin, it was coined by John F. Krafcik in 1988: https://www.lean.org/downloads/MITSloan.pdf).
The Lean philosophy stays very close to that I followed in the past decades: the CSM. This is my very own acronym for Common Sense Method, which is about what Lean says: do, what is need to be done and nothing else, do it well without waste, create value („wealth”) for the „user” of your work and do it continuously.
A side-note: I am not against formal methodologies, what I say is that they do not solve the problems of a company auto-magically. Let’s decide which 3-4 letters acronym we will use, read the books and do everything strictly what is written there. This is a recipe for a failure. In the defense of the serious methodologies, everyone of them starts with the warning: don’t do blindly every single step, you have to customize it to your own circumstances (company, products, people, technology, etc.).
As Krafcik observed: „Corporate parentage and culture do appear to be correlated with plant performance; the level of technology does not. Plants operating with a „lean” production policy are able to manufacture a wide range of models, yet maintain high levels of quality and productivity.”.
The five principles of Lean briefly
„Lean” production policy simply means to use less
- human effort,
- material,
- investment,
- work area,
- time,
- stock,
- miss and error (!).
and gives more quality and productivity.
Lean is a combination of approach, behavior, and tools. One secret of Lean is the standardized way of work, which is based on a tact of the work, and the order of the work items, The work items are highly practiced so the process is repeatable. It seems that the less the thinking is, the better is the production. However, to develop a lean production system requires a lot of observation, measurement, thinking and planning, the results must be applied to the work processes, their change and the changes in the surroundings then should be observed, measured, etc. again, and this continuous improvement should run in circles for a very long time…
As we see, Lean is not very far form Agile – and not very far from CSM, either…
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