On the “agree” side, I believe that good, basic IE skills are a great help when implementing Lean in just about any area. The stuff I learned in college about time study really did come in handy when I started doing time observations when the company I work for started its lean journey. In fact, some of the early “Lean Gypsies” that came to our company grossly over simplified how to do proper time observations. Having some IE training allowed some of us to avoid making some pretty silly mistakes.

But implementing Lean is all about culture change and much of the IE training I received in college was all about what I’ll call the “hard skills” and pretty much ignored what most folks call the “soft skills.” As Peter Tassi (Ford Motor Company) once said, “The soft stuff is the hard stuff.” So I think saying that Lean is “IE 101” grossly over simplifys what it really takes to truly implement Lean. I’d even tempt fate by offering my opinion that Mr. Cho grossly oversimplified TPS in his quote. But, what might seem simple for Toyota might seem very foreign to the rest of us too.

Here where I work, in every case, the improvements that have been successful and maintained have been created and managed by those who do the work.