I received a call today from the owner of a high end bike manufacturer. He called to ask about Seven’s approach to lean manufacturing and how we have applied it successfully. He is looking for ways to improve his business and feels that Seven has accomplished some of what he is striving to do.
This might not sound like an unusual call—business people discussing strategies. However, anyone in the bike supplier world will recognize this situation to be pretty unusual. The high end bike industry is very competitive; there are a growing number of suppliers looking for larger slices of a shirking pie.
I am flattered that he called to ask for advice. Before today, I never stopped to think about the fact that I and a few others at Seven were present during the beginnings of the coining of the term ‘lean manufacturing’. Jim Womack—author of the 1990 book, The Machine That Changed the World—coined the term in the mid 1990s. 'Lean' is essentially an Americanized expression for the Toyota Production System (TPS) that began in the 1940s.
In Womack’s 1996 follow up book Lean Thinking, he describes a bicycle manufacturing business case
study to show how lean manufacturing can work; this bike company is a thinly
veiled Merlin Metalworks. I was managing
production flow and fixture design during Womack’s writing of the book. My experience with the Toyota Production
System that began in 1991. I worked and trained in TPS throughout my time at Merlin until my exit at the close of 1996; this period was
a formative time for my respect of TPS.
My friend on the phone also asked about any consultants I could recommend for lean manufacturing. While he is understandably very weary of consultants—I am, too—he wants to take this journey seriously. It’s interesting that I have been working in the TPS world for nearly 20-years and I have only worked with two TPS consultants that were really capable—i.e. worth the investment. And this was more than a decade ago.
My friend was surprised that we don’t have anyone with whom we consult. There are many reasons for this; one of the reasons is because I’ve found that Seven’s manufacturing system has begun to diverge from TPS in some important ways. Not because TPS isn’t perfect—it is. The reason for this divergence is because our production process has gone beyond single-piece-flow to what I’ll call single-piece-design; not only do we build one at a time, we design one at a time. Kiichiro Toyoda (sic) never had this in mind when he was working on Toyota’s revolutionary process.
Well my friend on the phone doesn’t build custom frames, so TPS could be the best answer for his business. So, of course, I offered to help. We’ll see where it leads, and if Seven can help him get his business to the next step.
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