Re: Let me arrange your desk

mark howard — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 11:02:36 -0000

What's that line about never believing what you read in the papers?
Thereâ€™s nothing the media likes better than â€œthe worldâ€™s gone madâ€ stories.
The taped up civil servantsâ€™ desks is a classic example of the genre. By reducing to absurdity, the media missed the point of lean working which has led to Toyota, becoming the worldâ€™s best and most successful motor manufacturer.

Lean isnâ€™t about tidy desks but the mindset that goes behind them. Everyone is familiar with mechanics putting tools back on a peg board.

They do that so they donâ€™t waste time hunting for the tool the next time they need it. The lean principle about being tidy and ready for work is simply applied commonsense and no, Unipart never recommended putting tape round items on desks.

Keeping work stations business-like is especially relevant in hot desking or shift-working but applies anywhere. But thatâ€™s just a tiny part of thinking lean.

Lean is really about getting the people who do the work to suggest continuous improvements to how they work, have them reviewed by their workmates in a structured way which tests new ideas rigorously and have a system which allows improvements to be cascaded rapidly.

It works extremely well if the complete set of tools and techniques is rigorously applied and the culture is prepared for some genuine workforce involvement.

It kills command and control management as in lean it is the team that does the work which decides how the work gets done.

To get lean right you need that culture as well as the tools and techniques. Unipart is way ahead of the field after 20 years refinement thanks to its automotive heritage.

Still that probably would not make such a good media soundbite! But donâ€™t take our/my word for it have a look at what an independent academic says at http://www.som.cranfield.ac.uk/som/research/cen...

Oh and we don't have management consultants, what we do is second people well-versed in lean from their ordinary jobs into a client. Once the assignment is over they return to their normal activities with client and Unipart having gained - after all the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else.

It may seem like sophistry but our people prefer the term "expert practitioner" as they do and have held down real jobs, in the real world for many years in a growing and profitable company which works for blue chips such as Vodafone, 3, BSkyB, Jessops, Homebase and Halfords carrying out third party logistics

Re: It is not a waste if you are using the correct buzzword

mark howard — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 12:53:26 -0000

You make an interesting point about knowledge workers. Our main business is logistics for blue chips. Making sure their customers receive the goods they ordered. Vodafone being a major customer so if you have a Vodafone phone, Unipart got it to you.
But elements of lean culture, particularly knowledge transfer are equally applicable to programmers. I have very basic IT skills but from what I understand if one of your colleagues has developed a particularly elegant piece of code he or she may then face difficulties in sharing that with everyone in the organisation. In a lean organisation great efforts are made to share knowledge in a structured way so learning in one part can be shared by all and we don't end up spending ages duplicating work already done by a colleague or re-inventing the wheel. That's the problem with most understanding of lean they begin and end with the Toyota Production System. Equally I could argue about policy deployment (Prince II is a version) So there are things about lean which can benefit almost any organisation and we spend a lot of effort in not giving clients the answers but equipping their staff with methodologies and the culture where answers will come from the skills, knowledge and experience of existing staff. A further consequence of this is that staff in such a culture enjoy their work more and are more productive. Management fad? We've grown from almost noting in the third party logistics field to a major player. Could we have done it without our version of lean? Unipart does not believe so.

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Re: Let me arrange your desk

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