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What is Lean Manufacturing?

Lean organization or production is a term whose content is precisely defined by the book The Machine That Changed the World by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, Daniel Roos, and Donna Sammons Carpenter.

Lean as a social organization

The book The Machine That Changed the World compares the organization of production put in place by Toyota and some Japanese companies in the second half of the 20th century, which he describes as Lean, with that of automobile companies in the rest of the world, which he describes as Taylorist. It also compares the social organization, the organization of the ecosystem of subcontractors, financing, and that of customer relations. Finally, it compares the method of distribution of value between all these entities.

Taken as a whole, Lean is a social deal that existed in Japan during the second half of the 20th century. Employees agree to do whatever needs to be done (as opposed to only what corresponds to their status), and to train, and in return receive a job for life (shūshin koyō), the possibility of shaping the organization of their work, and better recognition of their skills. This social deal may have been dictated by the fact that in Japan immediately after the war, there was little capital and no immigrants to occupy positions at the bottom of the social ladder, contrary to what was believed. passed through Europe and the North American continent.

However, Lean is an area where the lobbying power of consultants is so strong that even the corresponding Wikipedia article is heavily biased towards presenting Lean as simply a series of tools for optimizing production, and reforming managerial posture.

Lean as a production organization system

The book The Machine That Changed the World opposes two contradictory modes of organization of production:

•

The Taylorist organization, where production is organized/optimized by non-production engineers.
Its archetype and Fordism, with its assembly lines popularized by the film Modern times by Charlie Chaplin. The goal is to obtain a workplace requiring as few skills as possible to encourage the replacement of workers and employees.

•	The Lean organization, where we seek to optimize production by operational staff, at the workstation level. Lean takes over the organization of workshops before the massification of the industry. The training of apprentices by experienced workers structures working relationships.

The main objectives of Lean production are:

•	Avoid doing what serves no purpose.

•	Producing right the first time, which leads, over time, to a highly standardized process, but in which the standard can be easily questioned by operational staff.

•	Determine and improve/strengthen what saturates first when demand increases.

•	Avoid intermediate stocks (just-in-time production).

In practice, the main effect of a Lean organization is to maximize the effect of continuous improvement.
The switch from a Taylorist organization to a Lean work organization is based above all on the resolute implementation of strict communication rules, focused on problem solving, having the effect of limiting the natural tendency of humans to favor the game of alliances.

How is Lean relevant in the West in the 21st century?

Lean is particularly relevant to 21st century manufacturing for two reasons:

•	Stopping doing what is useless is the concern that allows us to effectively fight against Parkinson's law which represents the main source of progressive bureaucratization of our public services and our businesses.

•	Giving operational staff the possibility and mission of optimizing their workstation allows them to give meaning to their work and social prestige to their role. This is the essential counterpart of the massification of higher education.

Lean and IT

Lean poses a considerable problem with regard to IT, which can only be solved in practice with the use of a specific tool such as Storga:

•	Stopping doing what is of no use prohibits the use of the spreadsheet (as an organizational tool as opposed to a financial modeling tool) which is not sufficiently automatable.

•

Giving control back to operational staff prohibits the use of IT systems based on the relational model (integrated management software packages, online services, etc.) that are far too rigid and therefore in practice impossible to adapt by operational staff (and IT specialists in a short time). reasonable).

Contrary to this, what we call “agile methods”, and misrepresented as Lean IT, in fact just corresponds to a mode of IT development which is still based on the relational model, but where the We carry out the commissioning gradually, to encourage the return of the field. This translates in practice into continuous improvement which continues to stagnate because of IT, from the end of the initial development phase, because of the rigidity of the relational model.

Go deeper

View question 'What does Parkinson's law teach us?'
Consult chapter 2 'Widespread nepotism' from the book From capital to reason which develops a little more the historical and social dimension of Lean.
Concerning the implementation of a Lean organization, consult the question 'What conditions must be met to produce serious reasoning? Problem solving.'
then consult the chapter Chapter 9 'The problem log' from the book From capital to reason which offers a method of putting it into practice.
Finally, tackle the book The Machine That Changed the World by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, Daniel Roos, and Donna Sammons Carpenter. A must to understand that our economic, social and commercial organization is not the only possible one, even within the capitalist system.

Concerning the IT part, consult 'What is colonization 2.0?'.

2024-09-21 08:38:05 Hubert Other forms of organizations seeking to free operational staff

En occident, au XXIᵉ siècle, le Lean semble plus médiatisé sous l'appellation Entreprise libérée qui correspond à sa forme New age.

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