subject: Lean Techniques Take Discipline [print this page] It seems like everywhere you turn these days you have individuals screaming about lean manufacturing and improving efficiency. It really is not a new thing; in fact Henry Ford wrote a book about it and tried perfecting the practice a hundred years ago. It is among the things that brought the assembly line in focus, trying to create a way to manufacture goods while saving as much time and labor.
It revolutionized the way things, large and small, were made. After World War II, during the rebuilding years, Japan improved on almost every aspect of the system and rebuilt its economy on building products that were high quality and efficiently made. This kept prices down and allowed them to take over shares of the marketplace that were never available in the past, making them a world leader in consumer electronics and automobiles.
These techniques are all available for the rest of the manufacturing world to read about, to learn about and to try and implement in their own facilities. But if they were easy and they were simple to perform, then everybody would be performing at their optimum level and there would be so much efficiency in every aspect of manufacturing, people probably would not know what to do.
So the hardest part of the process is not just deciding that you're going to do it and implement it into daily practice, but keeping the thing going. So many businesses find that it is just too difficult to be disciplined about being lean, that they fall back into their old ways before too long and the entire effort was wasted. It's just like when an individual is trying to change their ways, trying is stop a bad habit like smoking or maybe trying to add exercise into their daily routine.
It is way too easy to fall back on old habits and lose all of the progress that was made; it's just as easy to do in a business setting. No matter what the changes, if you are not careful and diligent, those changes can be swept aside and the old ways rear their ugly looking mugs again. So you have to have a plan, you have to have good individuals in place, but most of all, you have to have discipline. This discipline has to be from everybody. Form the bottom up and the top down, everybody has to buy into the program.
