I am reminded of coming to a company a few years back as a member of a new management team. The prior management team had hired outside “lean” consultants who attempted to apply some “cookie-cutter” lean by designing workcells & installing “flow” racking. Well, the “workcells” didn’t work, & the “flow” racks actually impeded work-flow. Even worse, “JIT” became synonymous with failure. We had to re-think how to introduce lean concepts without using any of the standard “lean” vocabulary!

While we were successful in implementing a very lean production system, the process was hampered greatly by the failures of the past. Had we not acknowledged that, and spent the necessary time to “learn the business”, we too would have failed.