Friday, September 18, 2009

Purpose of Lean Tools

What is the main purpose of lean tools?

What is the main purpose of 5S, Kanban, Visual Management, Glass Walls, hour-by-hour charts, Pareto Charts, Cause and Effect Diagrams (Fish Bone), Takt Time/Cycle Time Bar Charts, Spaghetti Diagrams, Concentration Diagrams, Value Stream Maps, and so on?

The main purpose is to immediately make problems visible.

Then we must focus our effort on solving them daily.

Everybody.

Every day.

2 comments:

Tim McMahon said...

Learning to see is not easy and sometimes it is very easy to blame lean as the cause of said problems. When in truth it is only the revealer of opporutinities to be solved. Lean forces you to react to things you may not normally notice.

Mike Wroblewski said...

Learning to see is also about honesty and humility without seeking blame. Very tough to make it part of a company culture.