Lean Principles | Overview of Lean Principles |
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Connecting your Customer to your Supply ChainThe Toyota Management System has left a great and valuable legacy to the entire industrialised world. If any new thinking deserves to take the title of a new 'paradigm' in the area of management theory, then surely it is the revolution in favour of connecting the customer to the supply chain.When Thomas Kuhn first used the word 'paradigm' (The Structure of Scientific Revolution, 1969), he spoke of competing narratives or stories used to explain the natural world and the way that things behave. Specifically, he talked about the competing narratives or stories offered by Galileo, Newton and Einstein for the behaviour of things in the world around us. He laid bare the social process that underpins the ascendancy and acceptance of any one 'paradigm' over any other. Put simply, it is a social and definitely political process. It may also be an infinite process. New paradigms don't simply take hold and annihilate their competitors overnight. There were strong camps debating the round versus flat earth narratives for a hundred years before the round earth took prevalence in scientific, social and educational spheres. To many outside of 'world class' manufacturing circles, the ideas housed within this new management 'paradigm' are heresy. They challenge accounting, planning, production and even some central social and political principles that have deep roots in the Industrial Revolution within the Western World. A problem that bedevils the popularity and understanding of this competing paradigm is the tendency to carry across a lot of Japanese words within the narrative. One gets the feeling reading about any Japan related management approach that there is some cultural barrier to be crossed before one can take in the full meaning. We have tried to avoid the plethora of Japanese terms that are often introduced. We don't think that the language lesson is relevant in an overview of this nature. For those wishing to understand the key elements of difference between the Toyota Management System (and all the other derivatives of the original thinking by Taiichi Ohno) and the traditional Western approach to managing production process, here are a few major differences in simple terms. |