Reading Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation has me wondering if we got it all wrong. James Womack and Daniel Jones offer the premise (in describing the flow piece of the Toyota Production System) that our batch mentality is flawed, with staggering consequence. We are so taken with the efficiency of producing things in batches, and so good at it, that we produce huge volumes of things...that we don't really need. Car lots stuffed with cars we don't need. (How much acreage have we set aside to store these cars on a permanent, rotating basis? How much time and gas is wasted because someone has to drive the miracle mile on the way to work each day?) Shirts, and DVDs and little plastic things sitting on shelves, so that prices are slashed to get them off the shelves to make way for more stuff that we are able to make from our incredible production system.
Lean Thinking's proper beginning is pull, where you "make exactly what the customer wants just when the customer wants it" so that you can "throw away the sales forecast and simply make what customers actually tell you they need." That is "you can let the customer pull the product from you as needed rather than pushing products, often unwanted, onto the customer." Lean begins with the end in mind.The book describes an experiment where the author's daughters were asked for the best way to fold, address, seal, stamp and mail their mother's newsletter. Their answer: batching the tasks, of course. Granted, the way to go if you want to get outside and play. But it highlights an illusory focus on what's best for the producer, not the end user, and not the total system. Don't you find that your mailbox is stuffed with ads and junk mail you don't want? Not only has the mailer wasted their time and money pushing the mail on you, you are now obligated to waste your time culling their product from the mail you do want. A bunch of junk produced just because it's cheap and easy to produce.
From the post-crash wreckage of our economy, we may find "pull" to be a fresh approach that helps us focus on making what we want, not simply what we can make lots of, offering a more efficient, whole system use of energy and resources, and which might tender, as Lean Thinking suggests, "the answer to the prolonged economic stagnation in Europe, Japan and North America."
Photo: Katherine Sanderson on flickr
Tags: Energy
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