The Toyota Production System (2013)
blog.toyota.co.uk
blog.toyota.co.uk
From personal observation this is very true, Japan has a great and unpretentious grey collar culture. There's a way in which all work is seen as equally essential and managers aren't above anyone else. Not just at Toyota, but even waiters in restaurants are treated like this, I think it shows in how negatively tipping is seen in Japan.
It's also a culture that exists here in Germany in Mittelstand companies, although sadly less and less in large firms where management culture from the Anglosphere seems to have gained popularity over the last 20-30 years. American management always reminds me of the historical British army, where the gentry directly was recruited into the higher ranks American management and workers seem equally stratified.
Interestingly, I’ve heard one profession that is not very well respected in Japan is software.
Can anyone elaborate or clarify why software developers might not be valued in Japan? I recall one person on HN explaining it as a problem of the market being saturated and software not being as huge of a market as it is in the USA. I can’t speak to that, though.
The original comment is hard to understand. Germany and Japan are two of the absolute worst places on earth to be a consumer/worker in the developed world (the IMF even produced a paper on this in an attempt to put pressure on Germany to improve standards for workers). The US is nowhere close to having a management aristocracy because the system is open. Even in the UK, which has a similar economic model, the low-level of competence among managers is actually a major factor behind weak productivity growth. People just long for systems that aren't like the one they have, low levels of employee turnover are not a panacea, they led to heavily rigid management and are often linked to a high proportion of unproductive, family-owned business that are managed by birthright...professional management is, innately, open. If you look at Denmark, high levels of employee turnover actually lead to higher wages because it creates so much more innovation (most countries that have any other model, including Japan, are trying desperately to get away from it).
Afaik, France is the only country that has the aristocracy model: it is usually literally impossible to be promoted into management if you didn't go to grandes ecoles, and most of the top jobs in govt and business are just rotated through this group of people. Unlike the US, the curriculum of related courses often has no relation to reality, and is designed to be as complex/abtruse as possible so entry to the higher reaches of society can be limited. It is difficult to understate how envied the US system of management is compared to this...it isn't just that the US does this slightly better, it is that the US is at 100, and everyone else is at 10. It isn't close.
And presumably, you don't come from Germany because all the reasons why it is bad are reasons that wouldn't occur to most people who don't live in that system: unions that are essentially non-functional/run by companies, staggeringly low levels of consumption relative to income (Germany runs a trade surplus worth 10% of GDP, which is all funded by savings...this is as high as China when China was at peak inequality), the average wealth of German citizens is equal to Greece...an economy that isn't functioning and doesn't have the large number of billionaires that Germany has (who largely got rich in the 30s), non-existent levels of competition, non-existent levels of innovation, closed banking system that pays nothing to savers and funnels free money to bankers/large corporations who have (historically) lost it all in short order, sometimes shockingly low wages (I believe this has changed but German apprentince wages were sometimes 2 or 3 euros/hour). Again though, read about German history (or even Northern European countries, generally bar the UK)...the economic system was designed by large corporations, that is who it is for. It isn't for consumers (or google "IMF Germany report"...if you don't believe me).
Not all jobs in Germany are unionized and many modern contracts have optional overtime hours built in them to prevent the employer from having to pay up for crunchtime.
> the most effective systems are mixed like the US system...Germany, in particular, is known for having fly-by-night
> private doctors who will do all kinds of crazy shit if you give them enough money
I think that's missing the point a little bit - when we talk about the UK and Germany having "socialised" healthcare this usually refers to the fact that it's not primarily provided by a mishmash of private insurers and private hospitals run as businesses for profit, but by the state as a service for the populace. It doesn't mean that there's not also a small private healthcare market for the wealthy to get quicker treatment in fancier facilities or to get unusual or elective procedures. One side effect of this is that there’s basically no anxiety about losing your access to healthcare if you lose your job or choose to quit - it’s just not part of the equation. This is the main point being made here. Oh and I think we should be very careful using the words "effective" and "US system" so close together in a sentence when talking about healthcare :-)
There are interesting examples of countries who have "mixed" systems though - Netherlands (where the healthcare company I work for are based) and Czech Republic (where I live) both have a sort of hybrid system of a market of health insurance companies in tandem with govt funding. And while ČR's isn't particularly spectacular, NL is very highly regarded worldwide. Frankly I'm a little surprised that those who are against M4A or single-payer don't ever cite it. Could be because the government still contribute more than the private insurers.
The reason why people don't mention NL is because it doesn't fit anyone's narrative. In the US, they have a mixed public/private system with a large private sector so their solution is: someone else should pay for my healthcare. Mixed systems are less attractive because, to a large extent, that is what the US has already (the US is exceptional because of the administration/ancillary costs in their system, not the structure). I agree though, NL is very good. The results are pretty average but it is very well optimised overall. I am from the UK, and healthcare is unbelivably bad because it is so ideological...that is definitely the wrong road.
No, you cannot work as an employee for as long as you want. My numbers were wrong, but it's a 10hr cap per day, and 48hr cap per week, as written in another comment. In its default, beyond that, your boss is personally responsible for this.
I am sure all you write about he financial system is true, but the thing is that compared to the US you can get away with much less savings and liquidity, and you get a much higher standard of living for a lot less money. Compare rent, cell phone, internet, health insurance, and you get a lot more for a lot less in Germany. With your health insurance not tied to an employer, you also don't run the risk of losing it when losing your job - e.g. in case of severe sickness, when you need insurance most. You don't need to save up for college of your kids, and can just send them to a public school.
[edit: typos and added schools}
The pensions in The Netherlands might actually be better arranged for now, but it's likely at some point that the EU will (indirectly) try to gain control over Dutch pension funds (e.g. by forcing these funds to allocate a certain percentage of spending to buy Italian bonds).
Further, what you sketch out in the second part is exactly my biggest squabble with Germany. Let's see how a society that lives off of exporting machines fares in the future after fighting innovation and entrepreneurship for two generations now.
That said, I still don't see even in the slightest how these are "the worst working conditions on earth".
It was not completely wrong. Being an employee gives you those benefits (eg you can stretch parental leave to 2yrs with part time work, the minimum vacation is 24 days instead of 30, but there's unlimited sick leave), and it is incomparable to the ridiculous PTO/PSL system in the US.
However, companies by and large only do this due to external pressure (govt, unions, competition), not any kind of inherent cultural benevolence.
In tech/engineering, this typically means that instead of direct hiring, hiring through agencies where people are regularly rotated out of projects to not have to become permanent employees, and without the regular benefits of the host company. Freelance tech work is actually becoming rare because German law has Duck Typing for determining employment status, so if you're de facto salaried, and the govt finds out, both the employer and employee suddenly owe all the relevant employment taxes, even years back, and because this has been abused and has been cracked down on, nowadays getting freelance work is difficult.
Of course, that somehow didn't stop companies from trying to pull the same scam with "gig economy" BS on the lowest paid workers the past few years.
It is easy to win at exporting if you pay employees in a functionally worthless currency. Germany's trade surplus is 10% of GDP, this is roughly where China was at peak. Germany can win at exporting because: consumers are conservative and will accept large corporations milking them, and other countries in Europe are willing to let Germany export deflation to them.
It is one of the most unsustainable economic models (and the source of significant global financial instability...China's trade surplus peaked in 2008, not a coincidence) and that is before you consider the need going forward for high levels of innovation, business creation, etc.
I didn't say on earth: I managed that section, I said in the developed world. If you provide a counter-example then I will accept you are correct.
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. I worked with German multinationals for about a decade, and I saw quite a bit of this type of behavior from their management.
At least that's what I remember from Rakesh Khurana's book, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession.
As a veteran, American management seemed to take straight from the American military management. I always assumed it was an artifact of WW-II management theories and the subsequent post-war academic funding boom.
In fact, management didn't exist before the US invented it. Most large companies in the UK were run by people who had no interest in management. They bought a factory then promised a piece rate to a labour gangmaster (this is an abtruse point but wage labour wasn't really a thing until the 20th century, the model was proto-industrial "business" structures which paid by output...wages shift risk to employers, and so that took time to develop). In Germany and much of Northern Europe, there was a very well-defined capitalist and worker class who negotiated through govt (because the capitalists mostly owned the govt and got their money to build stuff from state-owned banks, most unions ended up being allied to those capitalists/govt because revolution was taken quite seriously...left-wing unions didn't really exist). Again, there was no real concept of professional management...you negotiated with workers en masse, there was total seperation (and there is still is in Northern Europe, to a large extent...most billionaires in Germany got rich in the 30s, for reasons best forgotten, and have just passed it down unchanged which is why wealth inequality is so high).
So it was with the railroads that actual professional managers started appearing (railroads were undoubtedly a new kind of complexity but US ones were run far more professionally), and shortly after this that you see management training and the like. The US was, and still is to a large extent, one of the only places where you see universities actually relate to the real world i.e. you have universities teaching practical tasks like management (I am in the UK, management is still thought of as a "joke" subject by most academics...stuff like Classics and Politics is far more respectable than business, people who need to work for money are looked down upon as hopelessly gauche...it is kind of funny that people believe the opposite is true, but that isn't self-evident if you come from a society where practical knowledge is valued).
Btw, the defining book on this is Alfred Chandler's Visible Hand. He is probably the greatest historian of business (yep, he is from the US which is the only place where historians actually study this kind of thing en masse).
This is the military-industrial complex of Eisenhower. Companies were integrated into the military during WW2, and their influence was maintained after: management practices from companies into the military. Kennedy's govt was full of people from business making foreign policy/military decisions (with unfortunate consequences). Again, it is difficult to understate how far ahead the US was with management training so it is natural that this innovation spread into the military.
Wow. Just wow.
This is the truth so I don't get why you're bering downvoted.
Perhaps in this sense, Europe is much more unequal than the USA.
Bloomberg wrote about this issue: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-23/how-to-st...
As did Famcap: https://www.famcap.com/2016/05/2016-5-17-wealthspike-europe-...
Btw, neither approach is more optimal than the other. There are trade-offs. What some countries in Europe get wrong is that they are trading off innovation which is going to become more important for growth going forward.
Which IMHO is very healthy since it creates space for the younger players to move up vs having a reign of feudalistic families owning most vital sectors of the economy for decades or even hundreds of years.
https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/files/Social_Mobility_Europe_final...
>Japan has a great and unpretentious grey collar culture.
but I disagree on:
>There's a way in which all work is seen as equally essential and managers aren't above anyone else.
The latter I've seen to not hold true at all, and this assessment can be derived with equal weight from the very "top down, respect your seniors" culture of Japan that you're taught as early as elementary school over and over again.
I've seen this go in to effect so bad that clueless managers that are by no means an expert, overrides expert assessment, and people including the expert reluctantly budge to the pressure of "your boss/manager is always right".
The more realistic take would be "all work is seen as inherently valuable and should be taken seriously" to be the general mantra in the Japanese society, often associated with ikigai [0].
This societal pressure of "finding ikigai in your work, and strive for perfection" combined by "respect(unconditionally) the decision of the elder/boss" is probably an contributing factor to why Japans "Job satisfaction" level is around 42% [1]
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/job-satisfaction-glob...
Quote from [1]: "Only 42 percent of Japanese said they were satisfied with their work and, to add insult to injury, 21 percent said they were dissatisfied, both the lowest and the highest outcomes in the survey, respectively."
As a tech worker in Germany I've worked in 2 different established Mittlestand companies(not startups) that are pretty much world leaders in their niche and I promised myself I would never do that again.
Their company culture was terrible and while they kept preaching things like "we're like a family here and we're all equal" that was just a facade. Nepotism was rampant in both cases, with most employees being either related or close friends of the CEO and upper management, both coming from old-money families, generating a strong tribal behavior, so anyone who wasn't your boss could get you in trouble if they decided they don't like you and raises and promotions were allocated based purely on the tribe's perception of you and performance judged on butt time in your chair rather than results. As a foreign tech worker there who's not part of the tribe you're treated with an air of "you should just be grateful we gave you a job" even though they kept whining about not being able to attract new talent and grow. The lack of transparency was prominent with the CEO always preaching how "times are tight and we're all in this together" to justify lack of wage increases while he bought more vacation homes abroad and exotic cars. Information about the company's projects, customers, sales, revenue was all kept away from the employees who were not part of the tribal circles as it only circulated via spoken words.
Now I only work for big corps and it's been a huge improvement, with American corps in Germany treating you the best. They're transparent about their projects, customers and earnings in their quarterly town meetings, information is communicated electronically, not by speak, leadership and and workers are (mostly) hired and promoted based on merit and transparent goals and processes vs straight up nepotism and tribalism.
I wasn’t that lucky with American company. I ended up in one with American brand on the building and rotten hostile culture inside. Local patriarch is hostile towards Americans and the family insults new American owners on every occasion. Luckily I am leaving this show in 7 months for my own startup experiment.
I worked for quite a few young(!) small- to medium-sized tech companies in Germany, and most were like GP describes - unpretentions, genuinely down-to-earth management.
Of course, the opposite also exists, especially with old-school managers in well-established companies. Family-owned businesses are often the worst. The butt-in-seat mentality is very prevalent. During the Corona pandemic, they had to be dragged into the 20th century, kicking and screaming.
I don't think generalizations can be made in either direction.
I worked for two shitty German companies that, ironically, are well reviewed on Kununu and well respected in the tech field (hardware engineering). I also interviewed at many more established Mittlestand tech(hardware) companies and I saw the same shitty patterns(butts in seats culture, micromanagement, no work from home allowed, outdated tech, poor pay, "flat culture and family atmosphere") so I feel safe to generalize at this point.
>I worked for quite a few young(!) small- to medium-sized tech companies in Germany
Well the ones I worked at were part of established hardware tech Mittlestand that keeps getting positively exemplified as why Germany is so successful vs other countries, not the hip new software startup.
>Of course, the opposite also exists, especially with old-school managers in well-established companies. Family-owned businesses are often the worst. The butt-in-seat mentality is very prevalent. During the Corona pandemic, they had to be dragged into the 20th century, kicking and screaming.
Well, yes, that's exactly my experience. The experience made me give up for good on ever working for the Mittlestand business, especially the family owned ones.
Out of curiosity, in which city are you located and wich field of tech are you in? I'm open for moving once covid blows over and scouting for spots already.
To be fair, obligatory tipping is pretty rare outside of America.
- The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality: https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Deming-Leadership-Principle...
- The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education: https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Industry-Government-Educati...
- The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer: https://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Way-Management-Principles-Manu...
Deming is really a great thinking in the area of product development and agile methodologies.
By the time Toyota came back with a JV agreement w/GM in 1984, the NUMMI factory was the only Toyota factory with unionized labour force. UAW Local 2244 embraced Toyota’s methods and processes. But when GM quit(again), Toyota had no need to be there anymore with a local unionized work force. How would that jive their non unionized labour force everywhere else?
GM quit. That’s what they did. They were quitters. As was Ford(quit in neighboring Milpitas a few years before GM). Toyota was brilliant. They did good to the workers they let go when they quit NUMMI. They did good by almost $280 million. Towards the end, NUMMI only rolled out Toyotas.
It’s all Tesla now. For a while Jobs ran his NEXT manufacturing from NUMMI facility before he was welcomed back to Apple. That place is legit magick.
By all accounts, NUMMI was a great place to work and with GM gone, Toyota did not need the UAW Local 2244. Why would they? It is also California’s insane regulations and strangling policies that drove the last auto manufacturer out. Until Tesla came into the picture.
And CA almost drove Tesla away recently during the covid year..who knows what the future holds.
Today a large part of the land is a Tesla factory.
There's a great little footnote at the end of the podcast about a small upstart company buying the plant with the vision of building electric cars in the future.
Adding to the recommendations, I found Rother's Toyota Kata very valuable in understanding how to make Lean approaches work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Kata
For applying it in software, I loved Mary Poppendieck's books, which are listed about half-way down the page here: http://www.poppendieck.com/
And for the math-inclined, Reinertsen's "Principles of Product Development Flow" is very insightful: https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Product-Development-Flow-G...
As a fan of Drucker, Deming, Goldblatt... Today's "agile" has always confused me; I really don't understand when and why our profession jumped the shark.
My best guess as to how the shark-jumping happened: http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how...
The TL;DR version is that once it went mainstream, Agile was defined by the mainstream, which was not looking for excellence. Aided vigorously, of course, by the certification scam that is Scrum, where meaningless credentials were profitably bestowed by people who had little incentive to tighten things up. And one thing I've realize in ensuing years is that a key element was the culture of managerialism, which is inimical to anything that might make a manager look bad or diminish his empire.
I'm going to chew on your "second chasm" notion. Thanks.
Maybe it's just how things go. Fads, "selling out", poseurs, fashion, lost in translation, etc. Uncle Bob also references the rapid growth of our profession, where warm bodies are added faster than best practices can percolate.
To do list item: Maybe Everett's Diffusion of Innovations talks about this.
I've been getting a lot out of David Graeber's books, most recently The Democracy Project and Utopia of Rules. They're the first description of workplace democracy (collaboration, empowerment) which matches my own experiences. Back then, I was just kinda winging it (eg "What would Drucker do?"), because I really didn't have a lot other options.
Graeber considers the paradoxes better than most sages. eg How a movement begats its own destruction.
I keep thinking about that cliche of how anything taken to its logical extreme becomes it's own opposite, related to an abundance in one area causes a deficit in another.
Bringing us back to Goldblatt's Theory of Constraints. All balance is completely lost with all the players trying to hyper optimize their own little corner. Worse, "rationalists" weaponize fallacies like "beware the slippery slope!" to actively reject any kind of nuance, moderation, judgement, balance.
Thanks for listening. Trying to articulate my grievance helps me organize my thoughts.
--
Oh. One parting thought. I'm trying find a rhetorical basis for advocating moderation, proportional solutions. Something akin to rational altruism. I want a mashup of algorithms, game theory, and hedges (eg basket of investments, NPV) to guide decision making and governance. To make it okay to do 100 crazy ideas, because maybe 3 will hit the jackpot. To make it okay to try a variety of mitigations, because there is no one right-sized solution. Etc.
To answer what someone else asked in the thread, the reason other plants trying to copy NUMMI failed is that the GM managers could only copy the things they saw of the Toyota system. The lines on the floor, the equipment, etc. They did not and could not (in time) copy the mentality and attitude of the workers and management, to believe that quality was paramount and that stopping the line was ok in the name of improvement.
The attitude sank everything, and is hugely revealing. All the best tech in the world will not save you from the wrong attitude.
“Agile methodologies” are basically Deming/Lean approaches reinvented with more reliance on subjectivity and just-so stories and less attention on coherent theory, measurement, statistical analysis, engineering rigor, etc.
I think that varies quite a bit from methodology to methodology; certainly, the ideas of the Manifesto operate a higher level than methodologies, so the idea that a canned methodology is a solution rather than a starting point is contrary to the Manifesto, but aside from the potential that the methodology will be treated that way many of them are in other respects consistent with and actively supportive of the ideals of the manifesto.
I wish there were newer studies though that cover the rise of Hyundai/Kia quality in the last two decades. If you know of any please let me know.
I realize this is a tangent, but the fact that Hyundai managed to build this and sell it with a 10 year warranty is incredible.
This is one are where others impress as well. Even GM and Ford have come far in this regard.
Near the end of the book is one of the most important parts, yet nobody seems to talk about it. Workers and suppliers were committed to the system because the automaker was committed to the worker and the supplier. This is the cornerstone to the entire thing working. You can’t do the Toyota Production System without it, and few companies are willing to do so.
One thing I didn’t see mentioned that Tesla is currently doing is a very strong relationship between design and production. The upcoming Cybertruck for example doesn’t have paint and it has an exoskeleton design that should be much easier to produce. Over the years I have not seen any radical designs from Toyota that suggest that the ease of production was influencing radical design choices.
It's one thing to try something new. It's another to re-try something that failed (or was correlated with failure) within the lifetimes of people still in the industry.
Toyota doesn't buck trends like that. They're very conservative.
Tesla on the other hand takes risks.
I guess nobody wants to be the discount brand in the long term...
Great as long as you expect only 50K miles out of them.
Toyota has a completely different strategy,
Car reliability is just applied sociology. Vehicles last however long people keep fixing them and people keep fixing them as long as they expect them to last.
The 80s Japanese cars that the internet loves to circle jerk about where not any better than their domestic counterparts when put in equivalent hands. It wasn't until the 90s when the domestics somewhat ignored their car lines in favor of the new SUV hotness that the Japanese cars pulled ahead in terms of quality. You have to remember that the Japanese had various levels of partnerships with various American manufacturers at this time. It's not like either group was doing things the other was unaware of.
The K-cars and the other domestic stuff was CHEAP. That means that a lot more of them found themselves in the hands of bottom of the barrel customers. The kind of people who today roll 10k of negative equity into a Nissan Altima financed for 84mo with $0 down. Those are not the kind of vehicles that get garaged, get maintained on schedule and get cared for well. The Japanese stuff got put in slightly more caring hands from the get go (because the people who don't care about spending a few extra grand up front tend to also be willing to pony up for more preventive maintenance) and then 20, 30, 40yr out proportionally slightly more of it is still around. Look at what's on the used market for Crown Vics vs what's on the used market for Grand Marquis if you want to see a great example of this. Even if you exclude cop and taxi vehicles Vics will all be clapped out compared to the GMs because they weren't mostly owned by gray hairs who treated them nicely.
You also have to consider whether a vehicle's customer demographic trades in frequently, trades in infrequently or sells private party. The first couple generations of minivans mostly got bought by rich suburbanites who traded them in after say 5ish yr. Exporters bought tons of them. You'd think they're unreliable because you never see them in the first world but there are tens/hundreds of thousands of happy 1995 Ford Aerostar and 2002 Honda CRV owners in places like South America. The lower class variants of those same types of vehicles say the 1999 Town and Country and the 2004 Santa Fe are still abundant om American roads because the buyers were generally less well off and more likely to sell private party.
Go browse bubble Taurus (3rd gen I think) and Subaru Outback sedans on Craigslist, see what kind of condition they're all in then do the same for their more utilitarian station wagon counterparts (and adjust by relative sales numbers) and you'll see how much the expected use case and lifetime of a vehicle is a self fulfilling prophecy. Sedans get used hard as commuter cars and then junked or sold depending on age. Wagons are useful so wagons stick around as long as they run and keep getting fixed as long as it's not something crazy.
One should also keep in mind that all the production stuff from the article only really applies to the first slope in the bath tub curve. Once the vehicles have been on the road 5yr they will either be fixed because they weren't built right or they will have been built right from the get go. How long the vehicles last after that is mostly a reflection of the design rather than the execution on that.
Source: Former low end car flipper, junkyard employee, and currently own a small fleet of random 80s-90s foreign and domestic non-enthusiast cars.
You touched the subject of design and this is also part of the reason, Toyota sells the largest number of cars in the world and have huge amount of data which they use to perfect the design and fix weak points, this helps a lot to make their cars last longer than other vehicles in the same price range and category.
That doesn't explain why American cars have way more faults already in the first five years compared to Japanese cars though.
Interesting Side-Note: When I first started, there was an anecdote/story about a weld that had made its way accidentally (weld detector inadvertently turned off for the wrong run) into a production lot. This lot was used in a late design life cycle batch run (~50K cars) for one of the large Japanese manufacturers who were planning on announcing a new design model year for the upcoming year. When the auto maker heard that this weld had made its way into the batch run, they gave our company two choices: Either buy the 50K cars or pay for the auto manufacturers engineers to comb through each car to validate the wiring was weld free. I don't know which choice was made, but the there were alot of human and mechanical systems put in place to make sure the weld detector and the client requirements were well marked and understood for all runs thereafter. It was a fireable offense to mess with that detector in any unauthorized way.
But I want to add that Toyota can mean a dozen real manufacturers under a single brand.
Even in Japanese domestic market, there are "Junk" Toyotas, and Good Toyotas. There are good domestic market Toyotas made by external contractors, and there are bad Toyotas made by Toyota's own factories.
There are export grade Toyotas, made with export grade parts, and there are domestic market Toyotas with significantly different in design, and parts despite being sold under same model name.
And outside of Japan, there are many, many dozens of contract assembly plants ran by completely random people, assembling cars from very wide variety of parts, and doing many design, and spec changes.
By the way, what's the tool is there to detect cold welds in wiring?
> Both researchers and practitioners in industrial organization ask themselves today whether lean production is the only possible model for the future. Enriching Production proposes a radically different alternative, which was put into practice at Volvo’s Uddevalla plant during its brief life span.
The book "Enriching Production" is at https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/10785/1/MPRA_paper_10785.pdf .
As I have no experience with lean nor with automotive production history, I find it hard to interpret.
I think this is easier to read than the “Enriching Production” book: http://research.engr.oregonstate.edu/gwt/biblio/enriching-pr...
I think there are two differences one is a technical / engineering difference and the other is aimed at the worker enjoyment and well-being. The Toyota (lean) approach is presented as being all about manufacturing efficiency at the expense of the worker where as the Uddevalla approach appears to be sacrificing production efficiency for the benefit of worker enjoyment and well-being.
From the technical side it seems to be the assembly line production approach (lean / Toyota) vs craft / one off production approach (Uddevalla).
Current automotive manufacturing practices are based on an assembly line. This dates back to Henry Ford [1] [2]. The frame of the car travels down a line and components are brought to the workers to be added to the frame. The worker has a specialized task (e.g., attaching the passenger side door) that is repeated for the entire shift (or some specified amount of time).
There used to be a “craft” approach to manufacturing [3]. One person (or a few people) would make the entire product from beginning to end. This seems to be the team approach to production at Uddevalla.
Note: I didn’t read Enriching Production word for word and I have never heard of the Uddevalla approach before.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Park_Ford_Plant
[2] see the mass production section for an earlier assembly line. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_Arsenal
One of my complaints about "agile" is that it's nearly all-encompassing. If it isn't strict waterfall then it's agile, in one way or another, so "agile" becomes a pretty useless term.
And I don't much like agile because many of the features seem to have the goal of (to re-use your apt language) removing craft from software development.
I get the same feelings about what little I know of "lean". Everyone loves and claims to use it, one way or another. Which med me wonder about alternatives that aren't followed.
So I was receptive when I came across mention of the Uddevalla approach. I would really like to have seen that approach developed and tested further.
I don’t think there is such a thing as strict waterfall. Waterfall vs agile (or even spiral, or V shaped development) arguments don’t make much sense to me. IME, everything ends up being “iterative” in practice. Everything is a tool, use the tool that works for the given situation. I think principles are important and when evaluating different approaches it’s great to see what’s common to them.
Even the paper[1] that is credited (or blamed) for “waterfall” advocated iteration. Maybe I was aware of agile before reading this and that caused me to interpret it differently? That’s possible, but there is mention of prototypes, looping back, and even involving the customer!
I think it's better to think of it as the Toyota Production System (TPS) instead of lean. Lean comes from the MIT study of Japanese manufacturing where they specify 5 steps [2]. This is really the just-in-time pillar of TPS [see the "house" in 3] and there is a lot needed to be able to get there. TPS is an entire philosophy to run an organization. Everything from annual planning at the executive and leadership level all the way down to problem solving at the machine operator. The goal of TPS [shown across the roof of the "house" in 3] is “highest quality, lowest cost, and shortest lead time”.
To me, the core of lean is about problem solving. This can follow anything from the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle[4], OODA loops, six-sigma's DMAIC[4], Toyota's A3 method[5], and many others I am not aware of or am not including. The core of each of these is usually the scientific method. Again, these are all tools. Sometimes these are not needed, sometimes they are overkill, sometimes they are useful. Everything else in “lean” / TPS is either specific tools (e.g., 5-whys) used to identify problems or best practices (e.g., kanban, SMED) aimed at solving problems.
To give you an example of how we focused on problem solving, we introduced a daily production meeting to a department at the manufacturing plant. The production meeting took 5-15 minutes at the beginning of the shift. The focus was on SQDCME (safety, quality, delivery, cost, morale, environment) metrics. The leads and production planners check-in more often to hit their production targets. After instituting the production meetings and starting to track data more closely, we taught the production team the 7 QC tools[4] along with the A3 problem solving process[5]. We had really good results using these basic tools to solve production problems. These production meetings were driven by numbers, as we had to hit daily targets. If we didn't hit production numbers, it becomes why didn't we hit them? If we are producing too much scrap, it becomes why is there too much scrap? The team is cross-trained on different processes and machines. Often we would grab some cardboard from the recycling bin put it up beside the production board and start going through the A3 process. We scraped 5 of part ABC, here are the physical pieces to inspect that we took from the scrap cage. The work order said it was scrapped at machine 123 in process X, what could have caused this? From there, we can quickly note down a bunch of the hypothesis generated by the group, then we can develop experiments to test these, again, these come from the group. After that we can develop ways to correct and prevent these issues from coming up again. This isn't about "management" telling what they thing the problem is, or how to perform the process. This is about finding a better way and continuing to improve the current knowledge. Good ideas can come from anyone.
Without the ability to solve problems you're not able to start building the foundation of the Toyota house. The foundation refers to stability. This is often stability in the 4M's (that's the old literature): material, method, measurement, and person. How can you ensure stability if you can't solve problems, which is why I try to focus on that and build up the rest as needed.
I'm not sure what you mean by craft of software development. I am currently working as a business analyst in a team that develops in-house business automation software. From what the developers have told me, craft is making nice interfaces, writing clean code, writing reliable and fast software, solving business problems, and making the user of the software happy. When requirements are always changing, or edge cases are not covered, that leads to changing architecture, throwing away code, or software that crashes and users say it doesn't work.
To me, structure reduces some of those problems by focusing on the process of creating software. The process of moving from requirements, software architecture / design, development, testing, and deployment should be somewhat structured. My approach is not to design and document the entire software project before any code is written. I like to at least see, to the best knowledge at the time, the high-level of the project. Who will use it, what are the use cases, what systems do we need to interface with, where are the data sources, what are the outputs. This stuff needs to be documented and preferably reviewed with the team before development starts. From here, you're able to prioritize which use case has the most value, you're able to see what is risky, and what if it changes will cause lots of re-work. I can't count how many times I've seen people change their mind as soon as you show them some simple documentation, or say that's not what I meant, or start developing something to find out that they are solving 10% of the entire problem.
Apparently there is a manifesto of software craftsmanship[6]. If that's what you're referring to, I think it aligns with what my coworkers have told me, and I think (hope) the structure I've outlined above helps to allow my coworkers to achieve that.
[1] http://www-scf.usc.edu/~csci201/lectures/Lecture11/royce1970...
[2] https://www.lean.org/WhoWeAre/LEINewsStory.cfm?NewsArticleId... 1. Specify value 2. Map 3. Flow 4. Pull 5. Perfection
[3] see page 5 for the Toyota Production System "House". This document is what I recommend when someone wants to learn about lean. http://artoflean.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Basic_TPS_Ha...
[4] https://www.sv-jme.eu/?ns_articles_pdf=/ns_articles/files/oj...
You've provided some excellent commentary.
With the current pandemic and two preschoolers home from school, I simply don't have the time to follow your links and give them due thought and consideration.
Probably the fundamental blocking point is that I am self-employed, working with at most a small group of people for consulting/contract work. As such, I simply don't have the experience that would help me really understand how these issues affect things.
I will keep this page open, and read those links more thoroughly at some point, but probably not until after massive vaccination and re-opening of libraries, museums, and other places to burn off pre-schooler energy and attention needs.
I've found that they basically fear the change and would rather keep doing things the same way even if it results in problems. They think it's safer to try to find a magic bullet that fits into their model, such as going "all-Agile" or "hiring SREs". Anything that isn't a radical change from their hierarchical, waterfall, arbitrary-deadline, afraid-of-deploying-on-friday, drop-everything-we-have-a-great-new-shiny-ball-to-chase bullshit.
Ultimately JIT manufacturing should be seen for what it is: central planning in action. Good for the central planners, certainly, but not for the end users.
IIRC, one of the classic elements of kanban was also that you could easily setup a buffer at any point in the system, by controlling the number of cards/boxes, with kanban regulating the flow.
I.e. it's trivial to use TPS approaches to setup a "we need X amount of slack" and have its decentralised pull-based system appropriately adjust flow to maintain said slack.
Unfortunately in steady state the extra cost of maintaining slack is seen as unnecessary drag on company performance, and since you can't depend on competition having to maintain similar amount of slack... why be less competetive?
One of the reasons for maintaining slack is that many processes have been repeatedly shown to be on-average more productive when managed with slack in normal operations than without, because the disruption that occurs when processes have no slack and irregular events occur is much more costly than a certain amount of slack. Right-sizing slack makes you more, not less, competitive.
It's quite often not company performance concerns that drive out slack but the short-term performance of the unit at exactly the level the decision is made, and it's typically an eyes-open decision to gamble on unsustainable short-term gains lasting long enough to meet a short-term goal of the decision-maker (often, a bid to get a better job where they are no longer immediately responsible for the function being compromised).
One of the biggest fallacies is there management decisions within a company are consistently, or even mostly, driven by interests of the company as a whole, rather than the individuals making decisions, who often face practical personal incentive structures (especially in terms of career advancement) in which seeking the broad interests of the company and it's shareholders are not optimal.
Arguably that's a case of internal competition - the short term gamble will pay off showing you as more competitive, and you're not going to be there for the consequences, are you?
That said, I have encountered (more like been in the office when the discussion happened and got rest of the tale) bean counting issues at highest levels of a telco conglomerate where the "international" level was asking why we were spending so much on BTSes, with particular issue being how we stuck sizeable UPSes on them - whose maintenance wasn't cheap.
Ultimately it turned out that other national units (this was level of individual, nation-wide european telcos in one multinational) were either doing creative accounting or just skipping on reliability. But because of that, their BTSes looked much cheaper than ours, and we were getting the flack from multinational level.
To begin with players try to decrease local inventory to get a better score. i.e. lower costs by holding less. Then when a shock to the system is introduced, and orders spike, the players struggle to meet demand and the system becomes chaotic.
This seems to happen even when players have played the game before. The lesson seems to be that you can't easily do JIT without very good lines of communication or buffer inventory which is expensive.
As I remember it the cute, old metaphor I was taught was that inventory was like water in a river. We aim to lower the water until you just expose the rocks but no more. Then you remove the rocks one by one. If you deplete your inventory too soon you're exposing too many rocks and you'll ground your boat.
The only ones known to have massive problems with spare part supply issues is Tesla, which is a contributing factor in their high insurance rates (e.g. per https://electrek.co/2017/06/05/tesla-owners-insurance-rates/).
That's kind of funny. JIT is actually meant to be something closer to the market solution many others propose, as opposed to central planning. It's about identifying the local needs and ensuring they're met rather than trying to drive a top-down solution to the production problem.