by Jamie Flinchbaugh, Lean Learning Center
Everywhere I go, people want to hear case studies. Case studies are great. You can learn from them. You can feel like your problems aren’t so unique. You can get inspiration. The only trouble – never (ever) try to copy what someone else did. With that warning said, we try to put together case studies that show what people did, and even how it impacted them, from the inside. Here’s a selection from our latest about ZF Industries’ remanufacturing division:
This marked a major step forward in ZF’s ability to ‘manage the tension’ as they call it. Case in point, after a 2004 waste walk, the leadership team came up with a plan to reorganize and optimize its building. The staff said it would take six or seven months. Much to their surprise, the ZF team pushed hard and smarter to get it done faster. Three months later, both plant and warehouse were reconfigured to a lean layout. “Ahead of schedule, perfect execution and on budget,” explains current lean leader Tony Price. “The natural tendency is to build extra time into an activity as a safety net. But if you understand a process, you can simplify it and get rid of that cushion.”
If you’d like to download the whole case study on ZF in PDF format, follow this link.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I saw evidence of the desire to copy on the NWLean email list. A guy asked something like “we are doing lean at a company that makes chassis for a major bus manufacturer. We want to learn from others who have done lean, particularly those in our subindustry.”
Do they think their competitors are going to help them?
It’s too bad when people would rather take short cuts and copy someone else instead of learning the core lean concepts so that they can figure it out themselves.
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I completely disagree Mark. Copying is a great way to learn and implement Lean.
What humans don’t know by instinct we learn by copying or through experience.
Lean doesn’t come by instinct, and if you don’t have a Lean operational model to copy you can’t learn from experience working with that model.
After all isn’t “learning core lean concepts” a form of copying ideas and principles into your own beliefs system?
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I think the difference is in our definition of “copy.” When I think “copy”, I think to “do exactly like someone else.”
Now, learning from others… and modeling yourself after others…. that’s different.
Who did Toyota have to “copy”? Nobody. Did they learn from Henry Ford, American supermarkets, and their own loom business, applying that all to making cars? Absolutely.
The first hospital do lean didn’t have another lean hospital to “copy” from. That’s the distinction I’m trying to make.
Learning from is good, total copying is bad. With copying, people might take the parts that don’t apply as well as the parts that do apply. Do we really want an operating table that’s sliding slowly on a track at takt time? Of course not, but if you “copy” an auto plant, you might try that.
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I think there is an essential element that makes copying either relevant or a disaster. That element is REFLECTION.
If you have the mechanisms and intent (the latter is the harder part) to stop, reflect and then take new actions, theny copying can be a great way to learn and internalize new ideas.
What does reflection look like? It has to deeply examine what happened and why (and why, why, why, why, why), then what can we learn about what works and what doesn’t work and why, and then what new ACTION will we take. Most reflection, when it happens, skips this last step so its purely academic.
Thank you both Mark and Jon for exploring this topic.
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