| Volume 8 No. 7 July 2007 www.leanceo.com | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| From the Editor | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
As always we appreciate your support for our mission to spread manufacturing excellence knowledge. Click here for more information on sponsorships.
- Kevin Meyer |
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| In the Blog | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Lean Cost Accounting Huntzinger has marshaled little-known historical evidence to show how accounting figures came to be a very misleading way to manage a manufacturing company. He proposes abolishing meaningless figures too abstract from reality. Where cost figures are needed, derive them from simple parameter and process-based cost models that correspond with physical reality. This change in thinking opens an escape hatch from the traps that prevent companies from addressing their 21st century challenges.
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 Can Lean Exit the Tool Age? by Bob Emiliani
Lean management advocates have recently begun concerted efforts to push Lean out of the tool age and help people understand Lean as a management system. This article examines what happened when the advocates of an earlier system of management, Scientific Management, sought to change the widely-held view that it was nothing more than a set of tools to improve efficiency. Knowledge of their efforts might help us succeed, provided Lean has not already suffered too much damage.
Scientific Management was the hot new industrial management practice starting in the late 1890s through the 1940s. But soon after the principles and practices of this new management system were codified in 1911, most managers and observers started to interpret it as nothing more than a set of tools to improve efficiency. Other people saw it as a ruthless way to benefit corporations and their shareholders at the expense of workers. They also failed to acknowledge its long evolution in thinking and practice which corrected many of its deficiencies.
Almost immediately the advocates and foremost practitioners of Scientific Management were put on the defensive. It was so controversial that its principal architect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, was called to testify before a House Committee in 1912. Taylor had to explain to members of the committee that the management system he and others created was not evil, and went to great lengths to set the record straight over four days of testimony.
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On my too-frequent flights to New York recently, I started reading Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's a trip up and down the food chain from a naturalist's perspective, and one of his first stops is an examination of corn.
Government policies over the years have led to overproduction of this crop, from 4 billion bushels in 1970 to 10 billion bushels today. At the same time, because supply exceeds demand and prices are so low, federal government payments to farmers -- for corn alone -- comes to slightly more than $4 billion.
There are plenty of lean lessons here, from the folly of "push" production (even in food) to government muda. But what's really interesting is Pollan's view of the result of this overproduction
Read entire post (you can also view and post comments)
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Superfactory has just launched a series of online self-paced e-learning modules on the core concepts of lean manufacturing. Professionally developed, the audio/visual modules are ideal for introducing new employees to lean, allowing motivated employees to learn more, and to train offsite or remote employees. An interactive knowledge check ensures the concept was learned, with a report emailed to the training coordinator.
