Winds of Change - Part 1: Lean & BPM

By Tom Bellinson

I've been in a blogging rut lately, but I'm about to come out of it with a vengeance.  First, a bit of background.  Living in the Detroit area, I have been involved with the manufacturing industry on and off for most of my career.  At the time when lean thinking was starting to get some notice from domestic automakers (in case you didn't know, Toyota invented the philosophy), I was working for a manufacturing engineering services firm.

We were at the forefront of teaching lean concepts to our clients.  At the same time, a young developer on my team came to me with a radical new idea -- why don't we use process management techniques to help us design software?  Prior to this, I was unfamiliar with the concept of business process management (BPM).  I was immediately excited by this concept and took it to the executive committee.  We decided to adopt BPM as our central operating philosophy and used to to get our ISO-9000 quality certification.

Since that time, I have continued to study and practice in both areas.  I mention all this to establish that I have no bias in favor of one of these philosophies over another.  What I would like to do over this series of blog posts is introduce you to the basic concepts of lean thinking and business process management.  I will finish the series by discussing why these are not opposing philosophies, but rather complimentary ones that belong together like peanut butter and jelly (thanks to Bruce Meier for that reference).

Let's jump right in with a brief history of lean thinking and then we'll get into the nuts and bolts next time.  Like any new idea, lean was born out of the works of great ideas that came before.  People often cite Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor, who were pioneers of the industrial age, as early progenitors of some of the concepts that would become lean.

However, I believe that all of the pieces that were to become the first practical implementation of lean thinking happened at Toyota Motor Corporation and were driven by the then leader of the organization, Taiichi Ohno.  At that time, there was an American by the name of W. Edward Demming, who had tried to profess his philosophy to U.S. based manufacturers to no avail.  Eventually, he decided to give Japan a try as their manufacturing capabilities were on the rise.  He had better luck spreading his ideas there and there is little doubt that Ohno was influenced by Demming's philosophy.

Up until that time, the focus in manufacturing has been purely on efficiency -- make more, faster and cheaper.  As one might expect, the logical conclusion of the drive in this direction was that quality suffered.  Some quality issues were captured before the product left the plant and rework or scrapping was performed to address the defects.  Other defects found their way into the marketplace and poor product quality became the norm.  Those of us who are old enough remember that "Made in Japan" meant "cheap junk."

What Demming demonstrated was that poor quality products were eating up all the benefits of the efficiency that had been attained.  While the main production processes were highly efficient, the processes to remediate poor quality were very expensive.  He proposed a systematic approach to continuous improvement that would drive out poor quality while maintaining maximum efficiency.  It looked something like the chart on the left.

Simply put: create a plan for an improvement, implement the improvement, study its effects, and act on the information gained to create a new idea of what to try next.  Then, the cycle begins anew.

This idea of continuous improvement is deeply embedded in every modern operating philosophy whether it is Agile, Six Sigma, Lean or BPM.  It was also at the heart of Ohno's Toyota Production System (TPS), which is what would become "lean."  More about lean principles next time.  Stay tuned!