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pulled from the toolkit. A companion toolkit to lean is that of Six Sigma. If we are able to take advantage of both toolkits we can get the benefits of lean time reduction (lean) and we can reduce the variation in our system (Six Sigma). This common misunderstanding also gives us a superficial understanding of the different aspects of lean. Machine thinking sees flow simply as the most efficient way to produce a product or service. Pull systems are developed and introduced to reduce inventory, which will give us a benefit in operating cash flow. We strive for a leveled schedule (hei- junka) because the unevenness drives higher levels of inventory and waste throughout our systems. The concept of Jidoka (stopping when there is a prob- lem) is simply a way to keep defects from reaching our customer while standards reflect the most efficient way to perform our tasks. Visual management is imple- mented so everyone can know the status of an area simply by looking and we can leverage technology, often unproven, to engineer out problems in our systems. These views, while common, com- pletely miss the point of lean: surfacing of problems. Flow is implemented to immediately surface problems. Pull sys- tems and level schedules are introduced to do the exact same thing. Stopping immediately when there is a problem allows us the best chance of truly solv- ing our quality problems. Standards exist to give us a basis of comparison with the current and the desired state so problems are visible. Visual controls are instituted to clearly define the standards so abnormalities are obvious.


The Answer: See Lean as a System Linking Business Strategy to Personal Accountability


When we treat lean as a procession of projects that are completed by experts


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with marginal support from the team we find that, without fail, the improvements are superficial and transitory, with backsliding to the original performance levels once the expert moves on to the next project. We describe this phenomenon as “organizational en-


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