Manuale per la lean excellence. Guida alla trasformazione aziendale ed all'applicazione pratica del pensiero snello

When I wrote the original Toyota Way in 2003 I was trying to correct a major misunderstanding. Most books about lean were describing a litany of tools. Do 5S, set up cells, design a kanban system, install an Andon system to stop the line for quality problems, and more. Every new idea became a tool. Hoshin Kanri automatically meant fill out an X-matrix. Standardized work meant find the proper form and fill in the steps and times. Even an organizational design change like work groups were something to install. In fact many companies still judge the “leanness” of an operation by auditing relative to a checklist of lean tools. The message was do these things and you will be lean. And the goal was to do them as quickly as possible as broadly as possible. “Lean conversions” meant that you had installed all this lean stuff and got a good grade on the checklist. In the meantime I had been studying Toyota for almost twenty years and the message they gave was the exact opposite. The Toyota Production System is not about implementing tools, but about developing people to strive for excellence, by experimenting and learning. One-piece flow is an ideal to strive for-perfect, uninterrupted flow to the customer without waste. People must learn to set high, even seemingly unachievable goals in that direction and be persistent in working to achieve them. Along the way various tools will be useful but the specific ones, their timing, and their sequence will vary depending on the situation. You do not send a carpenter out to first do a bunch of hammering, and then go through and screw in a bunch of things in for a while, and hope the result is a house. Similarly the TPS house cannot be build by poorly trained people whose main skill is they learned how the tool works from a book or short course. They need a level of mastery of the art of lean to achieve the critical goals of the organization, whatever those are.