When we launched Lean Thinking in the Fall of 1996 we urged readers to "Just do it!" in the spirit of Taiichi Ohno. With more than 100,000 copies sold so far in English and with a steady stream of e-mails, faxes, phone calls, letters, and personal reports from readers telling us of their achievements, we know that many of you have now taken our and Ohno's advice.
However, we have also become aware that most readers have deviated from the step-by-step trans- formation process we describe in Chapter 11 of Lean Thinking. They have done a good job with Steps One through Three:
1. Find a change agent (how about you?) 2. Find a sensei (a teacher whose learning curve you can borrow) 3. Seize (or create) a crisis to motivate action across your firm But then they have jumped to Step Five: 5. Pick something important and get started removing waste quickly, to surprise yourself with how much you can accomplish in a very short period. Yet the overlooked Step Four is actualh the most critical 4. Map the entire value stream for all of your product families
Unfortunately, we have found that very few of our readers have followed our advice to conduct this critical step with care before diving into the task of waste elimination. Instead in too many cases we find companies rushing headlong into massive muda elimination activities kaizen offensives or continuous improvement blitzes. These well intentioned exercises fix one small part of the value stream for each product and value does flow more smoothly through that course of the stream. But then the value flow comes to a halt in the swamp of inventories and detours ahead of the next down- stream step. The net result is no cost savings reaching the bottom line, no service and quality improvements for the customer, no benefits for the supplier, limited sustainability as the wasteful norms of the whole value stream close in around the island of pure value, and frustration all around.
Typically the kaizen offensive with its disappointing results becomes another abandoned p soon to be followed by a "bottleneck elimination" offensive (based on the Theory of Constraints) or six a Sigma initiative (aimed at the most visible quality problems facing a firm), or...But these produce the same result Isolated victories over muda, some of them quite dramatic, which fail to improve the whole.