Book Excerpts - The Machine That Changed The World

The book "The  Machine That Changed The  World" by Womack, Jones & Roos is result of an MIT study which probed into "why Japanese car makers (read  Toyota) made strides into American market debasing the vanguards of auto world". Initially the American auto industry blamed the lower wages of Japan to be the main reason of better profit margins  for the Japanese firms, but it wasn't always the case.
This book is a 300 page case study of auto industry of late 1980's and early 1990's. It studied,defined and demystified the production system that world now knows by the name "lean". The importance of this feat lies in the fact that the look and feel of "mass production" with "lean production" is not much different outwardly. It took a lot of disciplined research on part of this team to figure out and call out this idea of lean production.

This post is just collection of sentences from the book, with comments added here and there and even if you are not into manufacturing or operations, I am sure you would find a nugget or two of wisdom in this book excerpt.

• "No new idea springs full-blown from a void. Rather, new ideas emerge from a set of conditions in which old ideas no longer seem to work."
• "From our survey findings and plant tours, we've concluded that high-tech plants that are improperly organized end up adding about as many indirect technical and service workers as they remove unskilled direct workers from manual assembly tasks...... we've devised the simple axiom that lean organization must come before high-tech process automation if a company is to gain full benefit."
• An input from one of the workers they surveyed ..."The workers I represent in American plants are getting the blame for the problems they are unable to correct."   (How wrong product design and wrong management can affect the workers )
• "Ease of manufacturing is not an accident"
• Productivity difference allocated by cause for one of the plants was " factory practice - 48%, design for manufacture - 41%, processing - 2%, sourcing - 9%.".....we can see proper design of a product/manufacturing process is extremely important for better  productivity at shopfloor.
• "We conclude that there are four basic difference in design methods employed by mass and lean producers. These are differences in leadership, teamwork, communication and simultaneous development"
• "To make sure that engineers maintain their sensitivity, Honda, for example, assigns even its most advanced engineers to spend a month of each year working in one of the other functional areas of company - selling divisions, factory operations, supply coordination and so forth."
• "Creating a top to bottom manufacturing system ( the complete supply chain) in each of the world's major markets benefits a company in five ways:
• It provides protection from trade barriers and currency shifts.
• Rich product diversity.(Each country/market would have products tailored to its needs)
• Sophistication that managers gain through experience in multiple scenarios.
• Protection against regional cyclicality. ( Downturn in one market wouldn't completely ruin you)
• Denies competitors "defended markets" (competitors cannot use their strength/profits in one market to put price lesser than you in another market)

If you are into literature  and I say classic probably you would list down -   A Tale of Two Cities,  To  Kill a Mocking  Bird... Atlas Shrugged .... But if you are into operations or manufacturing  or supply chain and I say classic, your list should invariably have this one name "The Machine That Changed The World". Do give a read to this book if you are interested to get a feel of how lean manufacturing came into existence. If you are looking for set of tools or techniques to deploy lean manufacturing this book is NOT the one to be read !!