Hi Bruce-

I see your point about people not really embracing Lean or TPS principles. But, I think headline is misleading... not all "Lean" efforts are bad and I'm sure there are people who say they are "implementing TPS" that have superficial tools-driven efforts.

I call the bad or misguided attempts you describe "L.A.M.E." - or Lean As Mistakenly Executed

There are many efforts labeled "Lean" that truly embrace the thinking and philosophy of TPS, as I'm sure you have seen.

Mark

The words given to me many moons ago, early in my quest for knowledge of how to implement improvement.  

The translations I was given:

Gaikan = "look and feel" or facade

Seishin = "heart and soul" or spirit.

I dont know if these translations are correct, but the concept has burrowed into my psyche.  The simplicity and elegance of these words i think reflect what you are saying in your article.

Rich

Bruce: When I saw the title of your article, I wondered if I would agree with the content. I surely do, and I can think of more things going astray in contemporary lean practices. Prominently, the quest for lean efficiency (driving down flow times in operations) often shows up negatively in the form of increased customer lead times, backordering, distribution inventories, and empty shelves or overaged product at retail. Reasons: (1) The lean ideal of concurrent production (of many SKUs or customer orders) is being sacrified to make operational lean numbers look good. (2) Conventional, wrong-headed performance metrics--especially, utilization--are still alive, so that equipment is often too busy to respond to short-term customer demand variations. (3) Contributing to the mismatch between what's produced and what's needed is a new class of "monuments": one or few complex, costly, high-maintenance machines that consolidate production of many products or orders, vs. concurrent production in many simple, low-cost cells. (These points are among the content of a two-part article beginning in the fall issue of Target magazine, entitled, "Coping with Takt-Time Tyranny and Capacity Confusion.")

One quibbling point, though: I don't know that kaizen has Toyota roots. I checked the 15 or so books written about TPS and JIT during the 1980s, about half by Toyota/Japanese authors and the rest by Westerners: The word kaizen does not appear in the index of any of them. (Researching the point further is hampered by the disappearance of my copy of Imai's 1985 Kaizen book.) I'll leave it to others to trace kaizen more deeply. Regardless of its origins, kaizen/continuous improvement surely is a basic element of lean/JIT/TPS as well as TQC/TQM/TQ.

Nice article, Bruce!