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What is Lean production?

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 production organization implemented by Toyota and some Japanese companies in the second half of the 20th century, which it calls Lean, with that of automotive companies elsewhere in the world, which it calls Taylorist. It also compares social organization, the organization of the supplier ecosystem, financing, and customer relationships. Finally, it compares the mode of value distribution among 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 everything that needs to be done (as opposed to only what corresponds to their status), and to undergo training, and in return receive lifetime employment (shūshin koyō), the possibility to shape the organization of their work, and greater recognition of their skills. This social deal may have been dictated by the fact that in post-war Japan, there were few capital resources and no immigrants to occupy the lower levels of the social hierarchy, unlike in Europe and on the North American continent.

However, Lean is a field where the lobbying power of consultants is so strong that even the corresponding Wikipedia article is heavily biased toward presenting Lean as a simple series of production optimization tools and managerial posture reforms.

Lean as a production organization system

The book The Machine That Changed the World contrasts two antithetical modes of production organization:

•

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

•	Lean organization, where production optimization is sought by operational staff at the job level. Lean adopts the pre-massification industrial workshop organization. Apprenticeship training by experienced workers structures working relationships.

The main objectives of Lean production are:

•	Avoid doing what serves no purpose.

•	Produce correctly the first time, which leads over time to a highly standardized process, but within which the standard can be easily questioned by operational staff.

•	Identify and improve/strengthen what becomes saturated 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 shift from a Taylorist to a Lean work organization relies primarily on the resolute implementation of strict communication rules focused on problem-solving, which limit the natural human tendency to favor alliance-building.

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

Lean is particularly relevant for 21st-century production for two reasons:

•	Stopping doing what serves no purpose is the concern that allows us to effectively combat Parkinson's Law, which represents the main source of progressive bureaucratization in our public services and companies.

•	Restoring to operational staff the possibility and mission to optimize their work gives meaning to their work and social prestige to their function. This is the indispensable counterpart to the massification of higher education.

Lean and computing

Lean poses a considerable problem regarding computing, which can only be practically resolved by using a specific tool such as Storga:

•	Stopping doing what serves no purpose prohibits the use of spreadsheets (as an organizational tool as opposed to a financial modeling tool) as they are not sufficiently automatable.

•	Restoring control to operational staff prohibits the use of computing systems based on the relational model (integrated management software, online services, etc.), which are too rigid and thus practically impossible for operational staff (and IT professionals within a reasonable time) to adapt.

Conversely, what is called 'agile methods,' and abusively presented as Lean computing, actually corresponds simply to a mode of software development that still relies on the relational model, but where deployment is done progressively to promote feedback from the field. In practice, this results in continuous improvement that continues to stagnate due to computing, starting from the end of the initial development phase, because of the rigidity of the relational model.

What is Lean production?

Lean as a social organization

Lean as a production organization system

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

Lean and computing

Further reading