As you probably know, I like to walk through the gemba, along the value stream, to see for myself how value is being created and how waste can be eliminated. However, recently I took a wonderful but dismaying walk through a facility that no longer creates value. The experience set me thinking about the history of the lean movement and how we can preserve it.

The place in question was Highland Park, Michigan, a ghostly town with a ghostly factory -- Henry Ford’s extraordinary Highland Park plant where flow production was pioneered. In the older building on the site, I walked the floor along the exact path of the world’s first continuous flow assembly line started up in the spring of 1914. It’s now empty, dirty, dark, dank, and uncommemorated.

In the six-story "new shops" across the street, I walked the exact path where the assembly line was moved later in 1914. This was just as the many continuous flow fabrication operations on either side of the line and in the upper floors sprung to life to supply the parts needed by the line. Today, the new shops - all six floors and three sky-lit bays of Albert Kahn’s glorious concrete structure specifically designed for flow production - also stand empty and uncommemorated, awaiting redevelopment or the wrecker.

It’s my belief that this building was the site of the most important industrial and economic leap in human history. Yet Ford’s descendents - and I include you and me since we have built much of our current lean knowledge on Ford’s shoulders -- seem to have applied one of his favorite aphorisms: "History is bunk." ("Bunk" is a 19th century American term meaning worthless nonsense.)

How can this be? I think the root cause is that most of us don’t realize that we are heirs to a remarkably long struggle in human history to see beyond isolated points in order to optimize the entire value creating process. We tend to think instead that lean ideas were mostly created by Toyota a few years ago and that the history of lean thinking has been short and easy.

I was recently reminded of the length of our struggle when my colleague and co-author Dan Jones visited the Arsenal in Venice, established in 1104 to build war ships for the Venetian Navy. Over time the Venetians adopted a standardized design for the hundreds of galleys built each year to campaign in the Mediterranean and also pioneered the use of interchangeable parts. This made it possible to assemble galleys along a narrow channel running through the Arsenal. The hull was completed first and then "flowed" past the assembly point for each item needed to complete the ship. By 1574 the Arsenal’s practices were so advanced that King Henry III of France was invited to watch the construction of a complete galley in continuous flow, going from start to finish in less than an hour.

The point I took particular note of from Dan’s visit was that the idea of continuous flow - which many in our community probably think was invented by Henry Ford - was being practiced more than 400 years ago, but then largely forgotten!

Once you are sensitized to the depth of lean history, along with its many advances and setbacks, it’s easy to begin filling in some of the other milestones:

By 1765, French general Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauval had grasped the significance of standardized designs and interchangeable parts to facilitate battlefield repairs. (Actually doing this cost-effectively in practice was another matter and required another 125 years.)

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Access past issues of the Superfactory Newsletter

• 10 Commandments of Kaikaku - 12/04
• Using IT to Support New Product Development - 11/04
• The Gemba Walk - 10/04
• Lean in the Office - 9/04
• Lean Manufacturing: Fat Cash Flow - 8/04
• "Lean" and the Toyota Production System - 7/04
• Offshore Outsourcing: Make Sure It's Worth It!! - 06/04
• What is Lean Accounting? - 05/04
• If It Looks Too Good To Be True - 04/04
• Defining and Achieving the Reliability Culture - 3/04
• Improving Your Lean Transformation - 2/04
• Managing Supply Chains - What the Military Can Teach Business - 1/04
• Bending Company Cuts Lead Time - 11/03
• Manufacturing is not in Trouble - 10/03
• Connecting Lean and Organizational Learning - 9/03
• How to Develop and Implement a Quick Changeover Program - 8/03
• What is the True Cost of Manufacturing Downtime? - 7/03
• Shift Your Plant Into High Gear - 6/03
• Lean Maintenance for Lean Manufacturing - 5/03
• The Roots of Lean Manufacturing - 4/03
• Timing is Everything: A Deeper Look Into Takt Time - 3/03
• Collaborative Manufacturing: Using Real-Time Information to Support the Supply Chain - 2/03
• Reduce Inventories & Improve Business Performance - 1/03
• Integrating Lean and Six Sigma - 12/02
• Lean Transformation of the Widget Company - 11/02
• Effective Accounting in a Flow Environment - 10/02
• Lean Is as Lean Does - 9/02
• Culture Change Brings Sweet Dreams to Sealy - 8/02
• Advanced Planning Systems as an Enabler of Lean Manufacturing - 7/02
• Undertaking Lean Strategies in Manufacturing - Never Two the Same - 6/02
• Defining World Class Practices:  An Alternative to Traditional Benchmarking that Achieves Leadership Consensus and Alignment - 5/02
• Creating Lean Leaders - A Hands On Approach - 4/02
• Supply Chain Management:  Cracking the Bullwhip Effect - 3/02
• The Roots of Lean Manufacturing - 2/02
• Lean and Flexible: A Way Forward for High Variety, Low Volume (HVLV) Environments - 1/02
• The Theory of Delays (TOD) - Part II - 12/01
• The Theory of Delays (TOD)