Lean Thinking Quotes

“Converting a classic batch-and-queue production system to continuous flow with effective pull by the customer will double labor productivity all the way through the system (for direct, managerial, and technical workers, from raw materials to delivered product) while cutting production throughput times by 90 percent and reducing inventories in the system by 90 percent as well.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation

“Dedicated product teams in direct dialogue with customers always find ways to specify value more accurately and often learn of ways to enhance flow and pull as well.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“However, what appears to be efficient to individual companies along the stream—for example, purchase of one of the world’s fastest canning machines, operating at fifteen hundred cans per minute, to yield the world’s lowest fill cost per can—may be far from efficient when indirect labor (for technical support), upstream and downstream inventories, handling charges, and storage costs are included. Indeed, this machine may be much more expensive than a smaller, simpler, slower one able to make just what the next firm down the stream needs (Tesco in this case) and to produce it immediately upon receipt of the order rather than shipping from a large inventory.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“we have developed the following simple rules of thumb: Converting a classic batch-and-queue production system to continuous flow with effective pull by the customer will double labor productivity all the way through the system (for direct, managerial, and technical workers, from raw materials to delivered product) while cutting production throughput times by 90 percent and reducing inventories in the system by 90 percent as well.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“How can performance be improved? Sweat and longer hours are not the answer but will be employed if no one knows how to work smarter.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“Para lograr un «salto» adicional se necesita en la actualidad una forma totalmente nueva de pensar sobre los roles de las empresas, los departamentos y las carreras profesionales, que canalice el flujo de valor, desde la concepción del producto hasta su lanzamiento a fabricación, desde el pedido hasta la entrega, y desde la materia prima hasta la entrega al consumidor.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Cómo utilizar el pensamiento Lean para eliminar los despilfarros y crear valor en la empresa (Gestión 2000)

“Pull in simplest terms means that no one upstream should produce a good or service until the customer downstream asks for it, but”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“because of the focus on perfection, to be further explored in Chapter 5, the whole system is maintained in a permanent creative tension which demands concentration.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“By contrast, work in an organization where value is made to flow continuously also creates the conditions for psychological flow. Every employee has immediate knowledge of whether the job has been done right and can see the status of the entire system.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“Classic batch-and-queue work conditions are hardly conducive to psychological flow. The worker can see only a small part of the task, there is often no feedback (much less immediate feedback), the task requires only a small portion of one’s concentration and skills, and there are constant interruptions to deal with other tasks in one’s area of responsibility.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“When people find themselves in these conditions they lose their self-consciousness and sense of time. They report that the task itself becomes the end”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“The types of activities which people all over the world consistently report as most rewarding—that is, which make them feel best—involve a clear objective, a need for concentration so intense that no attention is left over, a lack of interruptions and distractions, clear and immediate feedback on progress toward the objective, and a sense of challenge—the perception that one’s skills are adequate, but just adequate, to cope with the task at hand.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“The end objective of flow thinking is to totally eliminate all stoppages in an entire production process and not to rest in the area of tool design until this has been achieved.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“The precise techniques will vary with the application, but the key principle does not: Everyone involved must be able to see and must understand every aspect of the operation and its status at all times.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“By design, flow systems have an everything-works-or-nothing-works quality which must be respected and anticipated. This means that the production team must be cross-skilled in every task (in case someone is absent or needed for another task) and that the machinery must be made 100 percent available and accurate through a series of techniques called Total Productive Maintenance (TPM). It also means that work must be rigorously standardized (by the work team, not by some remote industrial engineering group) and that employees and machines must be taught to monitor their own work through a series of techniques commonly called poka-yoke, or mistake-proofing, which make it impossible for even one defective part to be sent ahead to the next step.7”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“It also seems like common sense that good production management involves keeping every employee busy and every machine fully utilized, to justify the capital invested in the expensive machines. What traditional managers fail to grasp is the cost of maintaining and coordinating a complicated network of high-speed machines making batches. This is the muda of complexity.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“This approach seems completely backward to traditional managers who have been told all their lives that competitive advantage in manufacture is obtained from automating, linking, and speeding up massive machinery to increase throughput and remove direct labor.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“It’s also essential that many traditionally massive machines—paint systems being the most critical in the bike case—be “right-sized” to fit directly into the production process.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“In the lean enterprise, however, the workforce on the plant floor needs to talk constantly to solve production problems and implement improvements in the process. What’s more, they need to have their professional support staff right by their side and everyone needs to be able to see the status of the entire production system”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“In the end, most MRP applications were better than manual systems, but they operated day to day at a level of performance far below what was theoretically possible and what had been widely expected when MRP was first introduced”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“downstream manufacturing operations often had too many parts (the muda of overproduction) or too few parts to meet the production schedule (producing the muda of waiting).”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“Raising awareness of the tight connection between sales and production also helps guard against one of the great evils of traditional selling and order-taking systems, namely the resort to bonus systems to motivate a sales force working with no real knowledge of or concern about the capabilities of the production system. These methods produce periodic surges in orders at the end of each bonus period (even though underlying demand hasn’t changed) and an occasional “order of the century” drummed up by a bonus-hungry sales staff, which the production system can’t possibly accommodate. Both lead to late deliveries and bad will from the customer. In other words, they magically generate muda.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“A key technique in implementing this approach is the concept of takt time,3 which precisely synchronizes the rate of production to the rate of sales to customers. For example, for a bicycle firm’s high-end titanium-framed bike, let’s assume that customers are placing orders at the rate of forty-eight per day. Let’s also assume that the bike factory works a single eight-hour shift. Dividing the number of bikes by the available hours of production tells the production time per bicycle, the takt time, which is ten minutes. (Sixty minutes in an hour divided by demand of six bikes per hour.) Obviously, the aggregate volume of orders may increase or decrease over time and takt time will need to be adjusted so that production is always precisely synchronized with demand.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“In the lean enterprise, Sales and Production Scheduling are core members of the product team, in a position to plan the sales campaign as the product design is being developed and to sell with a clear eye to the capabilities of the production system so that both orders and the product can flow smoothly from sale to delivery.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“the need to include employees of key component and material supply firms as dedicated members of the product team raises difficult questions of where one firm stops and the next begins, the second major topic of Part III.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“When a small team is given the mandate to “just do it,” we always find that the professionals suddenly discover that each can successfully cover a much broader scope of tasks than they have ever been allowed to previously. They do the job well and they enjoy it.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“In our experience, dedicated product teams do not need to be nearly as large as traditional managers would predict, and the smaller they can be kept the better all around. A host of narrowly skilled specialists are not needed because most marketing, engineering, purchasing, and production professionals actually have much broader skills than they have (1) ever realized, (2) ever admitted, or (3) ever been allowed to use.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“So, how do you make value flow? The first step, once value is defined and the entire value stream is identified, is to focus on the actual object—the specific design, the specific order, and the product itself (a “cure,” a trip, a house, a bicycle)—and never let it out of sight from beginning to completion. The second step, which makes the first step possible, is to ignore the traditional boundaries of jobs, careers, functions (often organized into departments), and firms to form a lean enterprise removing all impediments to the continuous flow of the specific product or product family.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“all of these activities—the creation, ordering, and provision of any good or any service—can be made to flow. And when we start thinking about ways to line up all of the essential steps needed to get a job done into a steady, continuous flow, with no wasted motions, no interruptions, no batches, and no queues, it changes everything:”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation

“Perhaps, just as the individual steps in the value stream are incomprehensible in isolation, customers do not really want to shop for isolated items.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation