Further Lean Lessons
Womack and Jones have produced another seminal article on Lean Supply. In this case, the title may be a little confusing; it will not teach us how to consume leanly, but rather how to change the process of providing customers what they want, where it's wanted and exactly when it's wanted. To improve, Womack and Jones have applied their important Value Stream Mapping tool to the steps between the beginning of the search for a product and service and its successful or otherwise conclusion. As with internal processes, waste is often rife and the ability of an organization to deliver what, where and when is found to be sorely lacking.
In order to create the capabilities required to remedy these gaps, a typical supplying organization will have to change. Its people must learn new ways of doing things: they must be retrained. The lessons from Toyota are clear here and they contradict many standard practices. At Toyota, training is not the job of training professionals; it is the job of mangers and leaders. Training is pushed out of the conference room and on to the office or factory floor where it is conducted with sketches and dialogue. This in turn requires a remarkably consistent set of knowledge among managers and leaders who must also be able to absorb and teach evolving new methods. Consistency is difficult to achieve when managers turn over rapidly or when organizations are coalescing or laying off layers of knowledge workers. In these cases, a heroic effort at knowledge management is necessary.
Another lesson is that the amount of time spent learning is prodigious. Much of this is on the job (direct OJT typically lasts 6 to 8 weeks at Toyota, with ongoing learning continuing thereafter). Toyota hires motivated, energetic people. For organizations populated by average people, motivation and improvement will require a heroic management effort in personal learning, training, leadership and business process improvement. Of course Toyota believes deeply in standardized work at every level, so these efforts are made easier there by common practices for leaders, managers and associates.
A final lesson from Toyota: implementation of change cannot be delegated to one individual or function: everyone must be accountable for successful change. If not, even heroic efforts will fail and the organization will start to look for excuses and victims, the first of whom will be customers who won't get what they want.
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