|
Words of
Jim Womack....
Dear
Steve,
Twenty years
ago this month, when my first daughter was born, the
young men I supervised in MIT’s International Motor
Vehicle Program went dashing out of the office to buy
her a gift. They returned shortly with a pink T-shirt,
size 1, with the stenciled message on the front “Muda,
Mura, Muri.”
My wife was
bewildered – “Is this how guys welcome a baby girl?!”
But I could understand. We had made an intense effort
that summer to understand these new Japanese terms for
waste (muda), unevenness in operations (mura), and
overburdening of people and equipment (muri) that
entered our lives when John Krafcik joined our team from
NUMMI, the Toyota/GM joint venture in California. The
boys just wanted to share their enthusiasm and took the
first opportunity at hand.
Our
understanding at that time was that “muda, mura, muri”
was a logical improvement sequence for lean thinkers.
We suggested
starting with muda, which is simply any activity that is
waste because it doesn’t add value for the consumer but
does consume resources. Conveniently, Taiichi Ohno at
Toyota had long before provided a list of the seven
types of muda that was an excellent guide for action. So
we urged managers to immediately tackle overproduction
(ahead of what the next customer needs) plus unnecessary
waiting, conveyance, processing, inventory, motion, and
correction.
An
additional virtue of starting with muda was that many
types could be removed from a narrow area without the
need to coordinate with the larger organization or
across firms. For example, machines could be moved
together quickly in a kaizen exercise to create a cell
-- to eliminate the muda of waiting, conveyance,
inventory, and motion. And this could be done without
disturbing (or getting the permission of) the broader
production system. We believed that the progressive
elimination of muda would pave the way for tackling mura
and muri.
That was the
theory. But now, 20 years later, it’s striking to me how
much effort we’ve expended on eliminating muda and how
little attention we have given to mura and muri. As a
case in point, the American car companies have just
announced new incentive schemes that will sell a large
number of vehicles over a brief period, running down
excessive inventories. This will lead to additional
overproduction at the factories, which will lead to more
inventories, which will lead to more incentives, which
will lead to…
Meanwhile
this unevenness in sales and production that is quite
unrelated to any desires being expressed by customers (a
common type of mura) -- will undercut the efforts of the
entire organization -- from sales to purchasing -- to
eliminate muda (waste).
And in most
companies we still see the mura of trying to “make the
numbers” at the end of reporting periods. (Which are
themselves completely arbitrary batches of time.) This
causes sales to write too many orders toward the end of
the period and production mangers to go too fast in
trying to fill them, leaving undone the routine tasks
necessary to sustain long-term performance. This wave of
orders -- causing equipment and employees to work too
hard as the finish line approaches -- creates the
“overburden” of muri. This in turn leads to downtime,
mistakes, and backflows – the muda of waiting,
correction, and conveyance. The inevitable result is
that mura creates muri that undercuts previous efforts
to eliminate muda.
In short,
mura and muri are now the root causes of muda in many
organizations. Even worse they put muda back that
managers and operations teams have already eliminated
once.
So I would
give some different advice to the boys at MIT if they
were preparing that T-shirt today. I would tell them to
have it read “Mura, muri, muda.” (Although the mother
wouldn’t be any less bewildered.) And I have the same
advice for managers -- especially senior managers --
trying to create lean businesses:
Take a
careful look at your mura and your muri as you start to
tackle your muda. Ask why there should be any more
variation in your activities than called for by customer
behavior. Then ask how the remaining, real variation in
customer demand can be smoothed internally to stabilize
your operations. Finally ask how overburdens on your
equipment and people -- from whatever cause -- can be
steadily eliminated.
This will be
hard work and will require courage because it will often
require you to rethink longstanding sales, management,
and accounting practices that create the mura and muri.
However, if you can eliminate mura and muri at the
outset to create a stable environment for your sales,
operations, and supply management teams, you will
discover that muda can be removed much faster. And once
removed it will stay removed.
Best
regards,
Jim Womack
Chairman and
CEO
Lean
Enterprise Institute (LEI)
|
