Rath & Strong Blog

Back to Basic Stability

There’s an old joke that involves someone asking for directions, only to be told “well you wouldn’t want to start from here”.

I’m sometimes reminded of it when people embark on their Lean Transformation journey. They get excited by the prospect of implementing a responsive system that does away with the need for short-term forecasting, dramatically reduces inventory and creates short, real-time feedback loops to reduce quality and other problems. And why not? It is a pretty appetizing prospect and there are a number of books that paint a very appetizing picture of the Lean approach.

The trouble is that you may not be starting from the place you would like to start from. And there are no magical short-cuts. If you want to implement a pull-based system, there are some pre-requisites that have to be taken care of, possibly even before you make your first Value Stream Map.

• You can’t operate with low inventories if your equipment is unreliable, or if you suffer from excessive rework - you’ll run out so frequently that you’ll use up your people’s patience and goodwill in no time.
• You can’t reduce your batch sizes if each new setup brings a host of bedding-in problems – twice the setups will mean twice the problems, at least in the short term.
• You can’t put a Kanban system in place if staff aren’t used to following standard work in a disciplined way – the system relies on close adherence to the disciplines that it demands.

The very books that paint a dramatic and exciting picture of Lean often neglect to mention these issues, perhaps because they assume that you will already be “ready”. But sometimes that’s not the case, and you have to start from a different place to the one you want to start from. Sometimes this is because (being blunt) the organization hasn’t been very sophisticated about managing their operations, and sometimes (also being blunt) because they are so sophisticated, they have lost sight of the basics. I’ve seen this latter case both in research and also in highly-sophisticated manufacturing operations.

The term that’s normally used for being “ready”is Basic Stability. It means that you can pretty much rely on your people and equipment to do what they are supposed to do, pretty much all the time. Basic Stability usually involves establishing (or re-establishing) standard work, implementing 5S and dealing with the main quality and equipment reliability problems. It might take six months; it might take two years. It shouldn’t become an excuse for putting off starting work on the more ambitious changes, and I’m not suggesting that everything has to be perfect, just that you have your operations running reasonably smoothly.  Soon enough you will get to the place that you wanted to start from in the first place, and you will have learned a great deal along the way.