Creating a Lean Culture, 3rd Edition

The Missing Link in Lean: The Management System ◾ 13

Relying on people brings its own set of issues. People require all sorts

of “maintenance” and attention. Left to their own devices, people are prone

to introduce all kinds of mischief—variation in the system that can take

things far afield from the original design. In a newly or recently converted

Lean system, people’s deeply ingrained habits from “the way we always did

things here” will continually emerge at any opportunity, often for years. If

anything, Lean production is more vulnerable to these effects than conven-

tional batch production, because of the tight interdependence and reliance

on precise execution in Lean designs. This is one of the paradoxes in Lean.

Lean execution is proce ...