engineering management

thinking lean

When companies snip the muda from their systems, the entire enterprise gets into the
act of change.

By Jean Thilmany, Supplement Editor

Lean engineering. the phrase has nothing to do with superthin supermodels who also happen to be engineers. Rather, it refers to a business practice brought to the United States by Toyota in the middle 1980s.

That practice—of breaking down a business process to its most valuable parts and paring wasted time, energy, and product—is thought by many engineering managers to be most needed on the manufacturing floor. That's simply not true, according to Lin Stiles, president of Stiles Associates LLC of New London, N.H., an executive search firm that places managers who are skilled in lean practices.

Managers at companies that go lean, as it were, quickly discover that no one is untouched by the change, Stiles said. Which is why it's helpful for manufacturing and mechanical engineering managers to familiarize themselves with the basic concepts of lean engineering.

Learning to Prune

Author James Womack brought lean into common business parlance with his book, The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production (Simon & Schuster, 1990). In it, he and co-authors Daniel Jones and Daniel Roos chronicle how Toyota excised waste from its business processes and saved untold dollars in the process.

In a second book, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation (Simon & Schuster, 1996), Womack and Jones outline how managers can put Toyota's principles into play at their own companies.

Every company has a core value, the authors say. They define that value as the product that best suits customer needs. Managers need to identify and clarify the value stream, which is defined as the actions needed to bring the product through the problem-solving stage into physical being.

They use a number of industry buzzwords that include "flow," "pull," and "muda" to elucidate their theory.

Flow traces the product across departments. Pull activates flow. In this way, the business reorients itself toward the pull of the customer's needs. Finally, with the company re-engineered towards its core value, the business reorients itself toward perfection, rooting out all muda, which is the Japanese word for waste, within the system.

Ken McClymonds, who is charged with making sure lean is as lean as possible at Dresser Inc. of Addison, Texas, defines lean production or lean engineering more succinctly. He's vice president of global engineering at Dresser, which makes flow-control products as well as measurement and power systems.

McClymonds has had 17 years of experience at a variety of companies with what is now called lean engineering. Before it was defined as such, what's now termed lean was mainly the purview of the old-time efficiency expert, McClymonds said.

"The real focus of this thing is basically eliminating wasted time and wasted effort as defined by the external customer," McClymonds said. "The external customer is the person you're making the product for. If the customer wants to pay for something, then it's value added. If he doesn't want to, it's not."

Done right, lean engineering cuts product cycle time and adds precious dollars to the company till.

"You should become the preferred brand in the marketplace because you're giving the customer more of what he wants than others are giving," McClymonds said.

Bringing lean engineering into a company can be compared, in a certain way, to housecleaning. Think of the stereotype of the 1950s housewife. If she really evaluated everything she did in a day, she'd likely find she wasted a certain amount of time running downstairs for cleaning products she'd forgot to haul upstairs. She'd find she spent a lot of time around the house putting individual items away, when she'd be better served tossing everything that had to be put away into a laundry basket and then putting the items back where they belonged all at the same time.

Especially in the 1950s, a housewife could invest in some of the latest labor-saving technologies—like a better vacuum cleaner.
Think of your own job. Find yourself checking e-mail five times each hour? It's probably wasted time and effort. Better to check once every few hours and respond to the most pressing e-mails then.

The goal in business, as at home, is to get rid of all procedures that don't add value. Of course, companies are quite a bit bigger and more complicated to run than the average household.

Isolating non-value-added activities is a systematic process. McClymonds, for instance, relies on a variety of methods and tools, including problem-solving diagrams and statistical techniques, to track down wasteful procedures. But once a company completes its lean implementation, most jobs become easier because they've been streamlined. According to McClymonds, employees working under the changed practices are often more motivated and can get more accomplished in the same amount of time.

"Life becomes simpler, believe it or not, and in this day and age, that's very helpful," he said.

Implementation time for lean practices varies widely among companies. While it's customary to roll out lean practices across each department—from financial to engineering to marketing—the process can stall if one department is more problematic than another, McClymonds said.

It goes without saying that Womack and others have helped push lean from the automotive world to nearly all walks of business.
Stiles, for example, has placed managers at hospitals, banks, insurance companies, and, of course, engineering companies.

"Right now, we have 30 different assignments we're working on, and I bet 12 of them are in engineering," he said. His placement firm specializes in finding employees with lean experience who want to move up the organizational ranks.

Many engineering companies adopted the practice early and for obvious reasons, he added.

"Typically, companies that were finding it difficult to come out with a new product in much less than five years quickly discovered that wasn't going to fly with the way the economy works today," Stiles said. "If you can't get a product out in less than five years, you may as well not be in business."

The engineering companies that sought to trim wasted effort and money from their engineering and manufacturing processes decided to go lean.

Do-Over

The key to lean is that few business areas are left untouched after implementation. It's the whole "butterfly flapping its wings in China" idea. Change how the job is done in just one department, and all departments will feel the effects.

Mechanical engineering managers, who may have thought their departments were exempt from new lean engineering changes, find that their practices must change as well, Stiles said.

Typically, an organization begins a lean implementation on the manufacturing floor. Experts put together teams of employees from all departments to look at that process from front to back.

Yet the manufacturing process doesn't really begin on the factory floor. It is also influenced by the financial, marketing, and, of course, engineering departments.

"The company quickly figures out that as you start to reduce setup time on large pieces of manufacturing equipment, you'll need to make changes not only to the tooling but to the design itself to make it more readily manufacturable," Stiles said. "That's where the design engineers start to get pulled in.

"Many companies had to go back and redo designs of the pieces they'd been making for years," he added. "They needed to totally revamp their inventory of drawings and bring them up to speed."

The real aim of lean engineering is to trim wasted time and wasted effort, as your customer defines them.

Mechanical engineers can no longer sit upstairs throwing their designs over the balcony to manufacturing, hoping they'll land, as Stiles put it. These days, especially in lean companies, mechanical engineering managers find themselves working ever more closely with manufacturing managers to come up with products that are easily manufactured, yet pleasing to the customer.

And today's lean engineering companies are naturally more customer focused, Stiles said. Customers must be brought into product development much earlier than in the past and need to provide input every step of the way.

Before lean practices went into effect, the customer would often see the product first in its initial prototype form. That would also be the first chance to point out product flaws.

"The companies had to be a lot more customer focused and have a lot more customer contact," Stiles said. "Without it, they ran the terrible risk of having the project doomed after they'd spent money on it."

For the companies that made the switch, the move to lean has been positive, he added.

The product design cycle at many of the engineering companies that Stiles has seen go lean has dropped on average from five years to eight months. And the percentage of sales made up by those new products has gone from 10 or 20 percent of total sales to around 50 percent.

"They can get these new products out a heck of a lot faster because they've gone through the lean processes," Stiles said. "And those design guys are now part of a cross-functional team and no longer being blamed for not being involved.

"They've learned what it means to manufacture something or to work with a customer, which was a role reserved for sales and marketing before," Stiles added.

So if you hear executive rumblings about lean practices or if you're thinking about putting them into play yourself, don't be afraid. After all, lean could be said to be akin to a reducing diet without the starvation but with great results.



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© 2005 by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers