Below I summarise three major works
of James Womack, I start with a summary of the first few pages of the book-“The
Machine that changed the world-How lean production revolutionalised the global
car wars”.James.P. Womack, Daniel T Jones, Daniel Roos and Donna Sammons
Carpenter, Simon and Schuster UK Ltd. 1990). I then summarise the Preface of
the book “Lean Solutions”James P.Womack
and Daniel T Jones,Simon and Schuster UK Ltd, 2005 and main result of the book Lean Thinking:Banish Waste and Create Wealth
in your Corporation. James P.Womack and Daniel T.Jones New York :Simon and Schuster, 1996,Second Edition,
2003.
This is done in order to to show
how Lean Thinking as a concept has evolved in the last twenty years.
Summary I-“ Foreword 2007 Why Toyota
- In 1990 Toyota was half the size of General Motors
and two-thirds the size of Ford. In 2007, Toyota
has easily passed Ford and is surging past GM to become the largest and most
consistently successful industrial enterprise in the world. When we read the
story of Toyota, GM and Ford we read the story of not merely three giant firms
in one giant industry, but two fundamentally different business systems, two
ways of thinking about how humans work together to create value,
mass-production was pioneered by General-Motors in the 1920’s as it passed Ford
to become the world’s largest industrial enterprise.The system was then widely
copied and used by enterprises in practically every industry all over the
globe-including Ford and General Electric-for nearly seventy-five years.The
other business system-lean production-was pioneered by Toyota in the twenty
years after World War II and is now rapidly diffusing to every corner of the
world.Let us consider mass versus lean production and show why lean is
superior. There are five elements of lean production-designing product,
co-ordinating supply chain, dealing with customer, producing the product, from
order to delivery and managing the combined enterprise.
Summary
II-Before you begin this book.(Womack 1990 page 1, 2)
Let us start our story with 1984,
the auto industries of North America and Europe were relying on the techniques
of the mass-production system and these techniques were simply not competitive
with a new set of ideas pioneered by the Japanese companies.The Western
companies did not seem to be able to learn from their Japanese competitors,
instead they were focusing their energies on erecting trade barriers and other
competitive impediments.At this time a team of western authors conducted
focused research of Japanese techniques which they named lean production
compared with the older western mass production techniques.
Summary III of Sections ofChapter 1-The Industry of Industries in
Transition(Womack 1990, pages 9-13)-After World War II, Eiji Toyoda and
Taiichi Ohno at the Toyota Motor Company in Japan pioneered the concept of lean
production.The rise of Japan to its current economic preeminence quickly
followed, as other Japanese companies and industries copied this remarkable
system.
Lean production (a term coined by
researcher John Krafcik in the International Motor Vehicles Program at MIT) is
‘lean’ because it uses less of everything compared to mass production-half the
human effort in the factory, half the manufacturing space, half the investment
in tools, half the engineering hours to develop a new product in half the time.
Also, it requires keeping far less than half the needed inventory on site,
results in many fewer defects, and produces a greater and ever growing variety
of products.
Perhaps the most striking
difference between mass production and lean production lies in their ultimate
objectives. Mass producers set a limited goal for themselves-‘good
enough,’which translates into an acceptable number of defects, a maximum
acceptable level of inventories, a narrow range of standardized products.To do
better, they argue, would cost too much or exceed inherent human capabilities.
Lean producers, on the other hand,
set their sights explicitly on perfection:continually declining costs, zero
defects, zero inventories, and endless product variety.Of course, no lean
producer has ever reached this promised land-and perhaps none ever will, but
the endless quest for perfection continues to generate surprising twists.
(“Lean Solutions”
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Summary IV -(“Lean Solutions” Preface -From Lean Production to Lean
Solutions,Womack, 2005, pages 1-8)
(As we saw in the previous section)
Toyota ’s
product development, supplier management, customer support, and manufacturing
processes were collectively the “machine” that was changing the world. This
conclusion naturally raised the question of how companies in any industry in
any country could also achieve process brilliance.
For this five simple steps were
proposed-(Womack, 2003)
Provide the value actually desired
by customers.
Identify the value stream for each
product
Line up the remaining steps in a
continuous flow.
Let the customer pull value from
the firm.
Finally, once value, the value
stream, flow, and pull are established, start over from the beginning in an
endless search for perfection, the happy situation of perfect value provided
with zero waste.
Consumers Dilemna in the 21’st century
Consumption should be easier and
more satisfying due to better, cheaper products.Instead it requires growing
time and hassle to get all of our goods and services to work properly and work
together. Stated another way, today’s consumers are often drowning in a sea of
brilliant objects.And this seems very strange when we stop to consider that
satisfying consumption-not just making brilliant products-is the whole point of
lean production.
Today’s situation of more choices
and more knowledge for the consumer, gained at the expense of more
responsibility and more decision and management time, can be summed up very
simply:
1)There are more and more
consumption decisions for consumers to make.
2)The evolution of the production
process, claims more of the consumer’s(unpaid) time and energy while blurring
the boundary between consumption and production.
But,
3)Consumers will have less useful
time and energy in the day in the years ahead.
Rethinking Value in the 21’st century
We need a better way for consumers
to obtain the goods and services they now want. This improved process is
called-lean consumption.But this must
be accompanied by a companion process, this is called lean provision, which comprises all of the steps required to
deliver the desired value from producer to customer, often running through a
number of organizations.
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