Manufacturers
have an advantage in process innovation because their processes are material
intensive and therefore largely visible.
They get to see their process every day.
They see what works and what doesn’t.
As a result they take action to improve what they see.
Mass
production replaced the craftsman era of manufacturing in the early 1900’s. Craftsman that worked on a product from
beginning to end were replaced by specialists in an assembly line, each using
standardized parts to create some portion of the final product. Mass production techniques “catapulted Ford to the head of the world’s
motor industry and virtually eliminated craft-production companies unable to
match its manufacturing economies.”[i]
The
principles and practices of mass production were soon adapted to business
processes. The flow of paper in the
office was not much different than the flow of material on the assembly line. Mass production gave us the serial business
process; each step of the process standardized and performed by specialists.
Beginning in
1950 Taiichi Ohno helped to develop the Toyota Production System for their
heavy manufacturing operations. The term
Lean was coined by International Motor Vehicle Program researcher John Krafcik
to describe the Toyota Production System “because
it uses less of everything compared with mass production – half the human
effort in the factory, half the manufacturing space, half the investment in
tools, half the engineering hours to develop a new product in half the time.”[ii]
Lean has now replaced
mass production as the primary method for innovating manufacturing processes.
Its rise has been rapid. Heavy
manufacturers outside of Toyota first began to adopt Lean in the 1990s, with
other non-heavy industry sectors beginning to adopt Lean in the 2000s.
Lean is
referred to in this book as Heavy Lean. This
distinction is made because Heavy Lean was originally developed to support
heavy manufacturing; with its heavy machines and heavy parts. The practices of Heavy Lean were developed
with all of this heaviness in mind.
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