Lean has its origins in Japan, while Six Sigma has its roots in the US from the 1980s (when we can trace the origins to Motorola). Continuously pursue perfection (continuous improvement - or Kaizen in Japanese).Let the customer pull the value through the processes, according to their needs.Identify and understand the value stream for each process and the waste within it.Understand the customer and their perception of value.There is a lot more to Lean Thinking but these five principles underpin the approach: It won’t just happen without commitment and ‘commitment’ alone isn’t enough either - you will need to stir it into action. Never waste the creative potential of people!Īll of the above has implications for Leadership. Toyota keeps teaching individuals how to work together.īeing Lean means involving people in the process, equipping them to be able, and feel able, to challenge and improve their processes and the way they work.Toyota involves cross-functional teams to solve problems.Toyota works constantly to reinforce that culture.Toyota creates a strong and stable culture wherein values and beliefs are widely shared and lived out over many years.By improvement based on action, one can rise to the higher level of practice and knowledge.”Īs we said in Lean Six Sigma for Dummies, the system focuses on training to develop ordinary people and teams that follow the company’s philosophy to gain exceptional results. We place the highest value on taking action and implementation. It must be practised every day in a very consistent manner - not in spurts. After all, Lean Thinking would not have taken root in Toyota if it didn’t have strong leadership commitment to create the environment needed to embed the principles and thinking into the organisation as a system.Īs Toyota chairperson Fujio Cho said: “The key to the Toyota way is not any of the individual elements but all the elements together as a system. The Japanese word for this kind of waste is Muda.īut to sustain success, organisations need a lot more than knowledge about the tools and techniques. The Lean Thinking world grew rapidly with a focus on reducing non-value adding activities or waste. Krafcik concluded: The system needs less of everything to create a given amount of value, so let’s call it Lean. Needed less inventory at every process step.Went from concept to launch, order to delivery and problem to repair in less time and with less human effort.Created products with fewer delivered defects.Required less investment for a given amount of production capacity.Needed less human effort to design products and services.On a whiteboard, he wrote the performance attributes of the Toyota system compared with traditional mass production. He was looking for a label for the TPS phenomenon that described what the system did. The concept of the word ‘Lean’ goes back to 1987, when John Krafcik who is now the CEO of Waymo (including the Google driverless car project) worked as a researcher in his earlier career at MIT. Toyota calls their system the ‘Toyota Production System’ (TPS). When people talk about the roots of Lean Thinking, the word ‘Toyota’ is often quoted. We are going to paraphrase some of the basics here with the emphasis on the leadership aspects behind the approach. When we wrote that book we wanted to ‘demystify’ the approach and make it accessible to everyone. If you’d like a serious grounding in Lean and Six Sigma then pick up a copy of Lean Six Sigma for Dummies. The latest most successful implementations of Lean Six Sigma bring together thinking, principles, approaches, tools and techniques from: This range is developing and changing over time as more and more organisations build ever increasing experiences of using the approach in very different organisations. Over the last few years, Lean Six Sigma has come to mean a number of things, but in reality most organisations use it as a tried and tested approach to implement continuous improvement.Īt Catalyst, we use the name to encompass a wide range of methods, tools and techniques that have their origins in different histories and backgrounds.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |