I have been meaning to post on who I believe the Kings of Lean are, so I put this little list together as a reference to my readers. This list is not all encompassing but I believe these individuals to be very important to furthering the cause of Lean Manufacturing. What I would like from you is if you know of any good quotes or any other person who was instrumental in furthering the cause, let me know!
Taiichi Ohno – Born in 1912, a Japanese Industrial Engineer is considered to be the Father of the Toyota Production System, which later became Lean Manufacturing in the U.S. He coined the term “Muda” in Manufacturing, identified the 7 “deadly” wastes to a company and the Kanban method. Later, he co-developed the concept of Just –in-Time (JIT) and how it can not only improve manufacturing companies but sales, marketing, and customer service.
Common Taichi Ohno Quotes:
1. “The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize.”
2. “Where there is no standardization, there can be no Kaizen!”
3. “All we are doing is looking at the time line, from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing the time line by reducing the non-value adding wastes.”
4. "No one has more trouble than the person who claims to have no trouble" (He is essentially saying that when a person brings up a problem solving activity it should be celebrated so things can be corrected!)
Taiichi Ohno’s 7 “deadly” wastes:
1. T: Transportation - moved it stands the risk of being damaged, lost, delayed, etc. as well as being a cost for no added value
2. I: Inventory - raw materials, work-in-progress (WIP), or finished goods, represents a capital outlay that has not yet produced an income
3. M: Motion - production process inflicts on the entity that creates the product, either over time (wear and tear for equipment and repetitive stress injuries for workers) or during discrete events (accidents that damage equipment and/or injure workers).
4. W: Waiting – Work in Process (WIP)
5. O: Over-Processing - Over-processing occurs any time more work is done on a piece than what is required by the customer
6. O: Over-Production - Overproduction occurs when more product is produced than is required at that time by your customers. i.e. large batches (considered the worst because it leads to excess inventory).
7. D: Defect – Extra costs incurred reworking the part, rescheduling production etc.
When I think of Taiichi Ohno, I think of two amazing stories that really capture his essence. The first one starts with him talking to a bunch of new Toyota recruits and he was describing the then called “Baka Yoke”, which means “Stupid Proofing” and the girl started crying because she thought he kept calling her “Stupid” so he changed the name to “Poka Yoke” or “Mistake Proofing”.
The second story is more of a collection of managers that would talk about how he would show up at their warehouse or sub-process and say you have to eliminate X by 20% by next year. He wouldn’t tell them how to do it but would show up in a year and expect results. So they started saying “Oh No” when they knew he was coming in for a visit.
Eli Whitney – Born in 1765, he is best known for inventing the cotton gin. What people don’t realize is that he is one of the pioneers and champions of using Interchangeable parts. Although he did not invent this method he brought this concept into the light of American Engineers.
Common Eli Whitney Quotes:
1. “One of my primary objects is to form the tools so the tools themselves shall fashion the work and give to every part its just proportion.”
Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval – Born in 1715, he was a French artillery officer and engineer who created a new production system that used interchangeable parts. He credited with being the first person to use this method successfully in assembly line production.
Henry Ford – Henry Ford, in my opinion, is the most influential of all industrialists, when it comes to the progression of Lean. He is the guy that Taichi Ohno learned from to create the Toyota Production System and Shigeo Shingo learned from to create the Shigeo Shingo award. He used the “Fordism” to mass produce inexpensive good coupled with high wages for workers to truly create an empire. He was the pioneer of “welfare capitalism”, where he designed a system to pay workers more than anywhere else (double anywhere else) to decrease the high costs of turnover and keep the best and the brightest. Along with Ransom E. Olds, he is credited with inventing the assembly line.
What most people do not know is that he is also the pioneer of the term “waste”, “value-added”, Design for Manufacture (DFM), Standardization, and Tolerances (to assure dimensional limits of interchangeable parts).
Common Henry Ford’s quotes and one quote about him:
1. “Time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage. The easiest of all wastes and the hardest to correct is the waste of time, because wasted time does not litter the floor like wasted material. “ - Ford
2. “It is the customer that pays the wages” - Ford
3. Charles Buxton Going said, “Ford's success has startled the country, almost the world, financially, industrially, mechanically. It exhibits in higher degree than most persons would have thought possible the seemingly contradictory requirements of true efficiency, which are: constant increase of quality, great increase of pay to the workers, repeated reduction in cost to the consumer. And with these appears, as at once cause and effect, an absolutely incredible enlargement of output reaching something like one hundredfold in less than ten years, and an enormous profit to the manufacturer. “
4. Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. – Ford
5. Don't find fault, find a remedy. – Ford
6. If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right! - Ford
Frank Gilbreth Sr. – Born in 1868, he was an early advocate of scientific management and as the pioneer of Motion Studies. He believed in the “one best way” theory; which, predates continuous improvement. He used a motion picture camera that was calibrated in fractions of minutes to time the smallest of motions in workers. Gilbreth focused on motion while Frederick Taylor focused on time. He often used his family as guinea pigs in experiments as was famously detailed in the 1948 book, “Cheaper by the Dozen.”
James P. Womack- He is best known for his book entitled, “The Machine That Changed the World”, which made the term “Lean Production” known worldwide. Other than doing various studies on the difference industry between the United States, Germany, and Japan; he is basically known for making the world aware of Lean Methodologies.
Common Quotes from James P. Womack:
1. “Even with those advances most manufacturers are not making a great deal of money and customers aren't happy, ... Lean consumption involves solving customers' problems completely, not wasting their time, providing exactly what the customer wants, in a location they prefer and a timeframe they need. And finally it is helping customers reduce efforts to solve their own set of problems.”
Frederick Taylor – Born in 1856, he is considered the father of scientific management and the first Industrial Engineer. He was a mechanical engineering graduate but commonly referred to himself as an Industrial Engineer because of his process oriented focus. Frederick Taylor, Deming, and Taiichi Ohno brought scientific management and industrial engineering to the front lines of the business war. Taylor’s scientific Management consisted of four principles:
1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of tasks.
2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.
3. Provide “Detailed instructions and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker’s discrete task”.
4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and works, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks.
He believed that only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone. He believed in establishing goals for productivity and a system of rewards for meeting the goals. He also said that management must make it a priority that workers know that if they increase productivity, there believe that it would mean less workers is not true.
Common Frederick Taylor quotes include:
1. In the past, the man has been first; in the future the system must be first…”
2. "There is no question that the tendency of the average man (in all walks of life) is toward working at a slow, easy gait, and that it is only after a good deal of thought and observation on his part or as a result of example, conscience, or external pressure that he takes a more rapid pace.
3. "Under this plan the better men gradually but surely slow down their gait to that of the poorest and least efficient. When a naturally energetic man works for a few days beside a lazy one, the logic of the situation is unanswerable. 'Why should I work hard when that lazy fellow gets the same pay that I do and does only half as much work?'
4. "Each workman soon finds out about what this figure is for his particular case, and he also realizes that when his employer is convinced that a man is capable of doing more work than he has done, he will find sooner or later some way of compelling him to do it with little or no increase of pay.
5. “Under the best day work of the ordinary type, when accurate records are kept of the amount of work done by each man and of his efficiency, and when each man's wages are raised as he improves, and those who fail to rise to a certain standard are discharged and a fresh supply of carefully selected men are given work in their places, both the natural loafing and systematic soldiering can be largely broken up. This can only be done, however, when the men are thoroughly convinced that there is no intention of establishing piece work even in the remote future, and it is next to impossible to make men believe this when the work is of such a nature that they believe piece work to be practicable. In most cases their fear of making a record which will be used as a basis for piece work will cause them to soldier as much as they dare.”
Dr. Shigeo Shingo – Born in 1909, Dr. Shigeo Shingo was one of the more famous Industrial Engineers throughout history. Coupled with Taiichi Ohno they formed a special team that created what we know today as the “Toyota Production System” He devised a special formula for quality control:
Poka-Yoke Techniques to Correct Defects + Source Inspection to Prevent Defects = Zero
Quality Control
Dr. Shigeo Shingo is basically the Japanese version of Frederick Taylor except he had a bigger influence on actual volume manufacturing. Dr. Shingo’s greatest accomplishments that led to the biggest effect on the Toyota Production System were:
1. Just-In Time (JIT) – Dr. Shingo and Taiichi Ohno co-developed this “continuous improvement” or “lean manufacturing” effort as it is known today. The essence of this philosophy was laid out in Taiichi Ohno’s section (TIMWOOD). Remember, land costs in Japan are very high and storing items for a long period of time can break a company’s ability to compete. The JIT philosophy was built out of necessity for survival rather than Kaizen.
2. Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED) – as part of JIT, he also pioneered the concept of Single Minute Exchange of Dies. The premise of this concept is to reduce set-up times which can directly result in smaller batch sizes for parts. Dr. Shingo’s approach to developing SMED was to identify and isolate set-up times into two distinct entities: Internal and External setup time. The goal being to convert all internal setup times to external set up times; thus, streamlining all aspects of the setup operation. According to some sources optimum lot size occurs when the interest costs of storing the lot size of items equals the value lost when the production line is shut down. The difference, for Toyota, was that the economic lot size calculation included high overhead costs to pay for the land to store the vehicles. Engineer Shingo could do nothing about the interest rate, but he had total control of the factory processes. If the change-over costs could be reduced, then the economic lot size could be reduced, directly reducing expenses. Indeed the whole debate over EOQ becomes restructured if still relevant. It should also be noted that large lot sizes require higher stock levels to be kept in the rest of the process and these, more hidden costs, are also reduced by the smaller lot sizes made possible by SMED.
a. External setup can be done without the line being stopped whereas internal setup requires that the line be stopped.
There are seven basic steps to reducing changeover using the SMED system:
1. OBSERVE the current methodology (A)
2. Separate the INTERNAL and EXTERNAL activities (B). Internal activities are those that can only be performed when the process is stopped, while External activities
can be done while the last batch is being produced, or once the next batch has started.
For example, go and get the required tools for the job BEFORE the machine stops.
- Convert (where possible) Internal activities into External ones (C) (pre-heating of tools is a good example of this).
- Streamline the remaining internal activities, by simplifying them (D). Focus on fixings - Shigeo Shingo observed that it's only the last turn of a bolt that tightens it - the rest is just movement.
- Streamline the External activities, so that they are of a similar scale to the Internal ones (D).
- Document the new procedure, and actions that are yet to be completed.
- Do it all again: For each iteration of the above process, a 45% improvement in set-up times should be expected, so it may take several iterations to cross the ten minute line.
3. Zero Quality Control –
1. 100% inspections at the source, instead of using sampling inspections.
2. Immediate feedback from successive quality checks and self-checks.
3. Poka-yoke designed manufacturing devices.
4. Emphasis on targeting the root cause of defects (source defect) whenever a defect occurs virtually eliminates the need for statistical process control.
Later, Dr. Shingo realized that statistical quality control could aid in eliminating defects. On the other hand, he continued to argue that by using sound manufacturing and process engineering practices, defects could be removed from processes without the use of many statistical tools used in most quality control techniques.
He took the metaphorical torch from Henry Ford and continued his tradition of continuous improvement and is considered one of the greatest contributors to modern day manufacturing practices. Utah State founded the Shingo prize for excellence in manufacturing in 1988 and is used to recognize superior manufacturing and customer service. The Shingo prize has been compared to the Noble Prize for manufacturing. The company I am working for right (Sandia National Laboratories) has been recognized as a Shingo Prize Award Winner.
Common Shigeo Shingo Quotes include:
1. “The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize.”
2. “When you buy bananas, all you want is the fruit, not the skin; but you have to pay
for the skin also. It is waste. And you the customer should not have to pay for the
waste.”
3. “Improvement usually means doing something that we have never done before.”
4. “A relentless barrage of “why’s” is the best way to prepare your mind to pierce the
clouded veil of thinking caused by the status quo. Use it often.”
Genichi Taguchi – Born in 1924, Genichi was an engineer and statistician. He was best known for applying statistics to improve the quality of manufactured goods. He developed the Taguchi Methods. A part of the Taguchi Methods is better known as Design for Manufacturing or Design for Robust Design, where he stated that variation control is best controlled early in the process. The process has three stages:
1. System Design – Design at the conceptual level, involving creativity and innovation.
2. Parameter (measure) Design – Once the concept is established, the nominal values of the various dimensions and design parameters need to be set. Taguchi’s argued that the exact choice of values required is under-specified by the performance requirements of the system. This would allow the manufacturer to choose parameters that are best for manufacturing. This later became known as “Robustification”. Robustificaiton is a form of optimization whereby a system is made less sensitive to the effects of random variability, or noise, that is present in that system’s input variables and parameters.
3. Tolerance Design- Using the Pareto Principle, with the successfully completed parameter design, and an understanding of the effect that the various parameters have on performance, resources can be focused on reducing and controlling variation in the critical few dimensions.
Dr. Edward Deming – Born in 1900, Dr. Edward Deming was an American statistician, engineer, and professor at my Alma mater, New York University! He was known to have the biggest impact on the Japanese Manufacturing methods that was not of Japanese race by making significant contributions to quality improvement.
In Japan, from June to August in 1950, he trained hundreds of Japanese Engineers in statistical process control (SPC) and concepts of quality. Deming’s message to Japan’s chief executives were, if you improve quality, it will reduce expenses while increasing productivity and market share. Parts of his famous teaching were the creation of “Kaizen eno Yon Dankai”, which later became known simply as “Kaizen”. Since Deming declined to receive royalties from the transcripts of his famous 1950 lectures, Japan’s JUSE’s board of directors established the Deming Price (Dec. 1950) to repay him for his friendship and kindness. Genichi Taguchi is one of the Deming award winners.
He defined the following ration to guide efforts in quality.
In the 1970s, Deming's philosophy was summarized by some of his Japanese proponents with the following 'a'-versus-'b' comparison:
(a) When people and organizations focus primarily on quality, defined by the following ratio, quality tends to increase and costs fall over time.
(b) However, when people and organizations focus primarily on costs, costs tend to rise and quality declines over time.
He also is known for his “Seven Deadly Diseases” to a company:
Seven Deadly Diseases
- Lack of constancy of purpose
- Emphasis on short-term profits
- Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance
- Mobility of management
- Running a company on visible figures alone
- Excessive medical costs
- Excessive costs of warranty, fueled by lawyers who work for contingency fees
Common Dr. Deming quotes include:
1. “There is no substitute for knowledge”
2. “In God we trust; all others must bring data.”
3. “Experience by itself teaches nothing”
4. “You can expect what you inspect” Deming emphasized the importance of measuring and testing to predict typical results. If a phase consists of inputs + process + outputs, all three are inspected to some extent. If you inspect the inputs and process more (then improve them, I expect), the outputs will have a more consistent result.
5. “Special Causes and Common Causes”. Deming considered anomalies in quality to be variations outside the control limits of a process. Such variations could be attributed to one-time events called “special causes” or to repeated events called “common causes” that hinder quality. One should focus on common causes.
6. “Acceptable Defects” Focusing on zero defects is a wasted effort but establishing levels of accepted variation is more beneficial.
7. “Deming Cycle” Plan-Do-Check-Act. Also known as the Plan-Do-Study-Act.
8. “What is the variation trying to tell us about the process, about the people in the process?” Dr. Shewart created the basis for the control charts. However, it was Deming who knew that physical processes never produce a “normal distribution curve” (Gaussian distribution, also commonly called a bell curve). He discovered that observed variation in manufacturing data did not always behave the same way as data in nature. (Brownian motion of particles). Shewart concluded that while every process displays variation, some processes display controlled variation that is natural to the process, while others display uncontrolled variation that is not present in the process causal system at all times. Deming renamed these distinctions, “Common Cause” and “Special Cause”. It is managements responsibility to do something about “Common Cause” Variation!
9. “If you can’t describe what you’re doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.”
10. “Quality is Everyone’s Responsibility”
11. “We should work on our process, not the outcome of our processes”
12. “If you don’t know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.”
The last person I would like to talk about in the blog, for the time being, is one of my favorite mentors, Eliyahu M. Goldratt.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt – Born in 1947, is an Israeli physicist who became known throughout the world as great Industrialist. He jumped onto the Industrial Engineering and Business Management scene with his successful book entitled, “The Goal”. “The Goal” outlines the philosophy of the “Theory of Constraints” (TOC). TOC views organizations as systems consisting of resources, which are linked by the processes they perform. Within that system, a constraint is defined as anything that limits the system from achieving higher performance relative to its purpose. There are essentially Five Steps of the process after defining the system and its purpose (goal) and determining how to measure the system`s purpose, which are:
1. Identify the system’s constraint
2. Decide how to exploit the system’s constraint
3. Subordinate everything else to the above decisions
4. Elevate the system’s constraint
5. Don’t allow inertia to become the system’s constraint. When a constraint is broken, go back to step one
The funny thing is that most scholars and almost all managers think TOC and Lean are very different. However, TOC and Lean both focus on the customer, both have a value chart (Value Stream and Value-Added Lane), both place emphasis on flow, both value the pull system, and both continuously seek perfection.
Where they differ is on the perspective of waste, the value stream definition, concept of inventory, idea of capacity, and cost accounting. I will go into detail on TOC vs Lean and how to find the best synergistic fit between the two in a future blog because of its importance and detail.
For this blog entry, it is sufficed to say that Goldratt has had a tremendous impact on Lean and the Kaizen/Kaikaku way of thinking because he has pushed the envelope to, in my opinion, bettering the philosophy of lean in many ways.
AND last but not least:
Scott Douglas Lager Jr. (me, sorry had to include)
Continuously pushed the envelope of the modern Kaizen/Kaikaku way of thinking in the areas of construction, low volume/high consequence manufacturing, design engineering, quality engineering, and system engineering.
Some of my original quotes include:
- Even Raindrops (Kaizen) will eventually create an ocean (Kaikaku)
- Muda is everywhere, the question is to what degree?
- Its not the 5 who's but the 5 whys! (I use this one a lot)
One last quote I would like to leave you with that is very lean in thinking is by Ross Perot: “If you see a snake, just kill it – don’t appoint a committee on snakes”. This is more relevant in big companies or the government because there are endless meetings and committees which essentially become the bottleneck themselves.
Please give me your feedback on the Kings of Lean. This was a fun blog to write and I look forward to any comments you provide i.e. other Kings that I left out, awesome quotes, differing of opinion, etc.
Ja Mata Ne!
Scott Lager
