Lean Principles as Generic Target Condition

Today I was thinking about how Womack's five lean principles ( Customer Value, Value Stream, Flow, Pull, Perfection ) fit in the overall concept of the improvement Kata as described by Mike Rother. In summary, my conclusion is that the five lean principles set a generic target condition for any improvement activity in an organisation.

Before becoming a lean thinker, I was educated in the Six Sigma school of thought. What struck me when first learning about lean was that it gave me guiding principles on how to optimize processes. These principles are Customer Value, Value Stream, Flow, Pull and Perfection (1). In my experience until then, Six Sigma had no such thing, other then a CTQ tree which designs customer expectations and CPk's (process capability) which measure the extend of meeting these expectations.(2) Clearly I'm not a master black belt, but having mentored many six sigma projects, I found that depending on the team I worked with, solutions to the same problems could be radically different. (3)

Even without fully grasping the real meaning and potential of these lean principles, they provided a lot of guidance for designing solutions. Honestly, I experienced it as a relief! Come on ... the solution chosen to be implemented could not just be determined by who was in the team (or which voting system was used) ...

Then I learned about the Improvement Kata in Mike Rother's book. Any improvement activity should start not only with a (measurable) problem statement, but also with a target condition. A target condition describes not only the measurable process indicators ( or target outcome) but also the ideal process design to give guidance to the solutions that should be developed. As I understood the importance of the target condition, I suddenly realised why an ideal state VSM was so important ...

Now let's fit the Lean Principles and the Improvement Kata together. For any (point or system) Kaizen I engage in, I will use the improvement Kata approach and design an ideal state which represents my target condition. In designing the ideal state and target condition, I will always use the Lean Principles as generic guidelines.

Imagine that all improvement activity within your organisation is using this approach ... -isn't that what the principles are meant for?-. Basically the lean principles will function as a generic target condition for any improvement activity in an organisation.

The summary of my lean learning for today: The five lean principles set a generic target condition for any improvement activity in an organisation.


-----

(1) I'm using Womack's five principles, but I could as wel refer to the 14 Toyota Way principles.

(2) I agree that by having added lean tools to the Six Sigma portfolio (turning it into Lean Six Sigma), some of guiding principles are now included.


(3) Here is an example to illustrate this. In trying to reduce lead time of refunding customers for credit notes issued, a six sigma team decided to move processing of refunds to India. This solution allowed to use a lot of cheap labor for fast refund processing, in a process with more muda which was less flexible ( due to e.g. language and distance) and not capable of communicating with front line teams or customers. The CPk objectives ( 60% lead time reduction) and required cost reduction (!) were achieved. Now, imagine what the solution would have looked like if this team would have used lean principles in designing the future state ...