But the reality is that Taiichi Ohno was pushed out of Toyota, because he pushed to hard to implement it across the whole enterprise, rubbing many others the wrong way. Toyota is run by people they are all flawed and make msitakes. To date the ideals of TPS have never been fully implemented anywhere, not even at Toyota. In fact we can probably find smaller companies who have taken implemetation much farther than Toyota ever will.

The TPS ideals that Ohno put together though embody some of the best ideas from around the world. BUT LIKE PERFECTION THEY WILL NEVER BE FULLY ACHIEVED. But working toward them every day will make us better.

And perhaps along the way some of us will start to realize that in; implementing anything, common sense needs to be applied, and at times some of the tools do not apply in a situation. In fact in some cases other non-lean ideas and tools may in fact do a better job, but going back to post war styled mass production is not possible or feasible.

In fact when I think back about the companies and plants I knew really well a tobacco processing operation did better job at embodying the ideals. They did it before Toyota ever even made a splash, or Womack and Jones wrote a book. They did by applying ideas they heard about and common sense.

One last point I am not a great fan of Toyota products, or the company. For an asian company I think Honda is much better run, as are Samsung, and Hyundai. You could probably guess what my favourite vehicles are still all Fords and Chevys. But the same problem could strike them.

Unfortunately unlike the food industry that pulls together when there are major safety threats, automakers will try to play up each other failures, it just makes them all look bad.

He said we need to quit saying “do this because Toyota says so” and prove the merit of ideas through PDCA. The only real authority is our own PDCA — what works, what doesn’t? Womack said many of us have been “riding in Toyota’s wake.” Not sure if he was looking in the mirror, also, with that statement.

Pity that some slimy consultants will now have a packaged plan (or software) for what’s better than Toyota.

What’s better than Toyota is what we invent and create in our own organization. We should learn from Toyota, but not blindly copy. That’s always been true and it’s more true now.

Just the other day an employee here where I work said something to the effect that, “Because of Toyota’s current situation we had better not be trying to do what they do”. The interesting thing is that I always thought that this particular employee was not listening to me as I was teaching lean principles. It was encouraging to me to think that I had actually been successful, on some level, teaching lean principles. And the Toyota situation has opened up the opportunity for more lean related dialogue.

Also, I’m thinking the only possible flaw in TPS related to Toyota current quality problems is that they never installed an andon device in the top managers office. And consider this:
1. If there was an andon device to stop all production, they never had to pull the cord in 73 years.
2. It was probably never tested. After all it had to stop some 300,000 employees in several countries.
3. Sometime during their 73 year history, they may have inadvertently moved the device to the legal department. And the complexities of evaluating a problem in the legal department would have made the device useless.

With that perspective, I often find opportunities to level a great deal of the process, and isolate the truly parts of the flow so they do not disrupt the main line.

Excellent information regarding heijunka; I’ve implemented heijunka in a Build to stock environment (much easier to do it…); what’s your suggestion about how to apply heijunka in a high mix, high volume, Customized orders operation?; in my new job, we handle up to 16,000 different product types, our daily avg. demand is 5K units and a minimal change of components between orders impacts forecast big time.

The Maskellian VS model is just one approach to VS alignment. This article was not meant to be an endorsement, or even a guide, but rather a 30,000-ft. examination of the basic theory and operating assumptions supporting that model. The article is necessarily simplistic; every company’s situation is a little different, so the response details will vary.

I agree that Lean Accounting can/should be embraced immediately, but Accounting for Lean – if implemented before enough enablers are in place – ends up as just another flavor of “wrong”, and may sour further efforts.

ON THE OTHER HAND, as you so appropriately noted, understanding Accounting for Lean can help a company change the way they think about their business and move toward leaner policies and practices. Implementing the simplified accounting practices, though, is better done in coordination with actual changes to the operational aspect (as Maskell himself suggests).

“The net effect is, as I am writing this, the specialist’s office is calling the referring dentist and asking them what, exactly, they want done.” You have to hope that the “specialist” talks directly to the the dentist.

My first observation is that behaviors which received positive reinforcement tend to be repeated until they become a habit (a default pattern of behavior). A corollary observation is that everyone involved in the process (including the managers) have existing habit patterns that do not include the new behaviors.

Therefore, successful changes must be sufficiently rewarding, prolonged, and repetitive that the associated new behaviors become habits.

Second, Value Streams appear to have fractal characteristics — similar patterns recur at different levels of observational detail. There’s a natural bias to assume that the map is the territory — that the Value Stream Map is the same as the Value Stream mapped. While this may be mostly true for those people completely inside the mapped Value Stream, the manager who “owns” the Value Stream is part of a larger Value Stream (a higher-level fractal). At that level, the initial Value Stream is competing with multiple other concerns (resources, relationships, and objectives). I think that most “management resistance” can be tracked back to an insufficient application of the WIIFM principle (What’s In It For Me?). This principle of enlightened self-interest appears to drive most behaviors, and may help to explain “management resistance” (i.e., management isn’t resisting the Lean tool, or the improvement, they just haven’t subjectively recognized that the new process is much more rewarding [to their higher-level value stream] than the current process.

I hope someone wiser can explain this in more depth, to affirm, refine, or reject it.

v/r;
John

Imitation is the sincerest compliment.

Keep up the good work!

John