【端午节晒书会—我最喜爱的外文书】Lean Thinking

       精益思想（Lean Thinking）源自于大野耐一上世纪在丰田推行的精益生产方式，经James P.Womack和Daniel T.Jones总结整理后升华成一种方法论。其适用范围不仅仅限于生产管理，还可以延伸到精益建筑，精益医疗等方方面面，甚至小到可影响你的一次出行安排，很有实用价值。

Lean Thinking 作者：（美）詹姆斯 P.沃麦克（James P.Womack）            （英）丹尼尔 T.琼斯（Daniel T.Jones）

        作者由简入深，先从价值导向，到价值流分析，如何消除浪费再到什么是精益向读者阐述这种方法论的精要。
        传统的商业定价思想是：价格=成本+利润，成本是一定的，价格的关键在于企业所期的利润率。而精益思想的观点是：利润=价格-成本，当价格相同时，成本越低则利润越高。这需要通过消除各种不必要的浪费。
        在后面的介绍里更是通过在各公司内推行精益思想的实例，如何消除这些浪费进行形象的说明。小到美国Lancaster Technologies和Danaher Corp.等小型企业，中到德国Porsche，大到普-惠和丰田这样的国际巨头，都可以通过精益思想的改造扭亏为盈。请注意，这些都改造都是仅仅通过消除企业内部浪费来实现的，没有任何压低供应商价格或降低质量等级的行为。实际上当这些企业改造成功后，他们反而与其合作伙伴分享了这些经验，共同降低成本并形成一个商家，供应商，消费者共同受益的局面，形成持续的良性循环。这也是日系产品历经多次经济危机屹立不倒的原因之一。
        精益思想既有日式的细致，又有美式的系统化。对于现阶段的中国制造业很有参考价值，师夷长技以制夷！



附：内容简介
Expanded, updated, and more relevant than ever, this bestselling business classic by two internationally renowned management analysts describes a business system for the twenty-first century that supersedes the mass production system of Ford, the financial control system of Sloan, and the strategic system of Welch and GE. It is based on the Toyota (lean) model, which combines operational excellence with value-based strategies to produce steady growth through a wide range of economic conditions.

In contrast with the crash-and-burn performance of companies trumpeted by business gurus in the 1990s, the firms profiled in Lean Thinking -- from tiny Lantech to midsized Wiremold to niche producer Porsche to gigantic Pratt & Whitney -- have kept on keeping on, largely unnoticed, along a steady upward path through the market turbulence and crushed dreams of the early twenty-first century. Meanwhile, the leader in lean thinking -- Toyota -- has set its sights on leadership of the global motor vehicle industry in this decade.

Instead of constantly reinventing business models, lean thinkers go back to basics by asking what the customer really perceives as value. (It´s often not at all what existing organizations and assets would suggest.) The next step is to line up value-creating activities for a specific product along a value stream while eliminating activities (usually the majority) that don´t add value. Then the lean thinker creates a flow condition in which the design and the product advance smoothly and rapidly at the pull of the customer (rather than the push of the producer). Finally, as flow and pull are implemented, the lean thinker speeds up the cycle of improvement inpursuit of perfection. The first part of this book describes each of these concepts and makes them come alive with striking examples.

Lean Thinking clearly demonstrates that these simple ideas can breathe new life into any company in any industry in any country. But most managers need guidance on how to make the lean leap in their firm. Part II provides a step-by-step action plan, based on in-depth studies of more than fifty lean companies in a wide range of industries across the world.

Even those readers who believe they have embraced lean thinking will discover in Part III that another dramatic leap is possible by creating an extended lean enterprise for each of their product families that tightly links value-creating activities from raw materials to customer.

In Part IV, an epilogue to the original edition, the story of lean thinking is brought up-to-date with an enhanced action plan based on the experiences of a range of lean firms since the original publication of Lean Thinking.

Lean Thinking does not provide a new management program for the one-minute manager. Instead, it offers a new method of thinking, of being, and, above all, of doing for the serious long-term manager -- a method that is changing the world.

精彩书摘

Chapter 1

Value

A House or a Hassle-Free Experience?

Doyle Wilson of Austin, Texas, had been building homes for fifteen years before he got serious about quality. "In October of 1991 I just got disgusted. Such a large part of my business was waiting and rework, with expensive warranty claims and friction with customers, that I knew there must be a better way. Then I stumbled across the quality movement."

He read Carl Sewell´s book on car dealing, Customers for Life, and decided to test his claims by buying a car at Sewell´s Dallas dealership. ("I thought that if even a car dealer could make a customer feel good, it should be easy for a homebuilder!") His purchase was such a positive experience that he asked Sewell for advice on quality in home building and was told to read the works of W. Edwards Deming.

Doyle Wilson is the archetypical Texan and never does things halfway. By February of 1992 he had launched a wall-to-wall Total Quality Management campaign at Doyle Wilson Homebuilder. Over the next three years he personally taught his workforce the principles of TQM, began to collect and analyze enormous amounts of data on every aspect of his business, got rid of individual sales commissions ("which destroy quality consciousness"), eliminated the traditional "builder bonus" for his construction superintendents (who were qualifying for the "on-time completion" bonus by making side deals with customers on a "to-be-done-later" list), reduced his contractor corps by two thirds, and required the remaining contractors to attend (and pay for) his monthly quality seminars.

Customer surveys showed a steady rise in satisfaction with the homebuilding experience and sales grew steadily even in a fiat market as Wilson took sales from his competitors. In 1995, Doyle Wilson Homebuilder won the National Housing Quality Award (often called the Baldrige Award for quality of the construction industry), and Wilson set a goal of winning the Baldrige Award itself by 1998. Yet he was not satisfied.

"I knew I was making progress in competing with other builders for the new-home buyer, but a simple fact, once it lodged in my mind, wouldn´t go away: 78 percent of the homes bought in central Texas each year are ´used´ or older homes. I´ve been making progress in increasing my share of the 22 percent seeking a new home, but what about the 78 percent who bought older homes? Obviously, these buyers are the real market opportunity."

So instead of surveying people who were buying new homes, Wilson began to talk with people who were buying older homes. What he discovered was obvious in retrospect but has required a complete rethinking of his business. Specifically, he found that many buyers of older homes hated the "hassle factor" in negotiating for new construction, the long lead times to get the job done and move in, the inevitable "to-be-done" list after moving in, and the "phony choices" available from builders who promise custom homes but then load on as "standard equipment" many features of little interest to buyers.

Wilson soon realized that that was exactly what he had been asking his customers to go through. By contrast, older-home customers could clearly see what they were getting, buy only what they wanted, and, often, move in immediately. "No wonder I was losing 78 percent of my potential customers!"

To create a hassle-free experience to go with the house itself (these together constituting Wilson´s "product"), it was necessary to rethink every step in the process. He has recently opened a one-stop sales center where the customer can see and decide on every option available in a house (for example, the forty different varieties of brick, the three thousand varieties of wallpaper, the four styles of built-in home office), customize a basic design with the help of an Auto-Cad computer system, select features beyond the standard level (for example, extra-thick carpet pads, additional outdoor lighting, and heavier-duty wiring), determine the exact price, work out the mortgage, arrange for insurance, and arrange for the title search. For customers truly in a hurry this can be done during one walk-through of the sales center.

To shrink the lead time from contract signing to moving in from six months to a target of thirty days, he has reorganized his contract-writing and job-release process and is developing a system of pull scheduling for contractors who are assigned new jobs as downstream jobs are completed.

He is also introducing standardized work statements, parts lists, and tool kits for every job. Eventually these steps will eliminate the "to-do" list because the new system does not allow the next task to start until the previous task is certified as complete with perfect quality.

Finally, Wilson has created a wide range of basic house designs with a minimum construction standard and asks the customer to specify all materials and systems upgrades (using the computer design system) to a selected base design so the customer only pays for exactly what she or he feels is really needed.

Doing all of this will not be easy, as we´ll see when we return to this example in Chapter 3 on fiow, but Doyle Wilson has already made the key leap. Instead of concentrating on conventional markets and what he and his contractors were accustomed to making in a conventional way, he has looked hard at value as defined by his customers and set off down a new path.

Start by Challenging Traditional Definitions of "Value"

Why is it so hard to start at the right place, to correctly define value? Partly because most producers want to make what they are already making and partly because many customers only know how to ask for some variant of what they are already getting. They simply start in the wrong place and end up at the wrong destination. Then, when providers or customers do decide to rethink value, they often fall back on simple formulas -- lower cost, increased product variety through customization, instant delivery -- rather than jointly analyzing value and challenging old definitions to see what´s really needed.

Steve Maynard, vice president for engineering and product development at the Wiremold Company in West Hartford, Connecticut, was trying to deal with these very problems when he reorganized Wiremold´s product development system in 1992. For many years previously, Wiremold had developed new products -- consisting of wire guides for office and industrial users and surge protectors for PCs and other business electronics -- through a conventional departmentalized process. It started with marketing, which commissioned surveys comparing Wiremold´s products with the offerings of competitors. When an "opportunity" was identified, usually a gap in the market or a reported weakness in a competitor´s offering, a design was developed by product engineering, then tested by the prototype group. If it worked according to specification, the design proceeded to the engineers designing the machines to make the products and eventually went into production.

This system produced designs which lacked imagination and which customers often ignored. (The designs also took too much time and effort to develop and cost too much to make, but these are a different type of problem we´ll discuss in Chapter 3.) Simply speeding up this process through simultaneous engineering and then broadening product variety would just have brought more bad designs to market faster. Pure muda.

Steve Maynard´s solution was to form a team for each product to stick with that product during its entire production life. This team -- consisting of a marketer, a product engineer, and a tooling/process engineer -- proceeded to enter into a dialogue with leading customers (major contractors) in which all of the old products and solutions were ignored. Instead, the customer and the producer (Wiremold) focused on the value the customer really needed.

For example, traditional Wiremold wire guides (which channel wiring through hostile factory environments and provide complex arrays of outlets in high-use areas like laboratories and hospitals) had been designed almost entirely with regard to their ruggedness, safety, and cost per foot as delivered to the construction site. This approach nicely matched the mentality of Wiremold´s product engineers, who dominated the development process and who found a narrow, "specification" focus very reassuring.

As the new dialogue began, it quickly developed that what customers also wanted was a product that "looked nice" and could be installed at the construction site very quickly. (Wiremold had never employed a stylist and knew relatively little about trends in the construction process.) Customers were willing to make substantial trades on cost per foot to get better appearance (which increased the bid price of construction jobs) and quicker installation (which reduced total cost).

Within two years, as all of Wiremold´s product families were given the team treatment, sales for these very conventional products increased by more than 40 percent and gross margins soared. Starting over with a joint customer-producer dialogue on value paid a major dividend for Wiremold quite aside from savings in product development and production costs.

While Wiremold and Doyle Wilson Homebuilder and every other firm needs to be searching for fundamentally new capabilities that will permit them to create value in unimagined dimensions, most firms can substantially boost sales immediately if they find a mechanism for rethinking the value of their core products to their customers.

Define Value in Terms of the Whole Product

Another reason firms find it hard to get value right is that while value creation often fiows through many firms, each one tends to define value in a different way to suit its own needs. When these differing definitions are added up, they often don´t add up. Let´s take another nightmarish (but completely typical) travel example.

One of us (Jones) recently took his family on an Easter holiday in Crete from his home in He...

{:7_180:}{:6_137:}楼主辛苦了！谢谢分享{:6_153:}