Next frontiers for lean 精益生产下一代前沿.pdf

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 4 Next frontiers for lean Ewan Duncan and Ron Ritter Lean-production techniques have been revolutionizing operations for 50 years. Advances in technology, psychology, and analytics may make the next 50 even more exciting. When the first issue of McKinsey Quarterly rolled off the printing presses, 50 years ago, nearly everyone in senior management thought that manufacturing operations had been perfected. Henry Ford’s great innovation, the moving assembly line, had been refined over the previous five decades, had served as the arsenal of democracy during World War II, and by the mid-1960s was operating efficiently, at great scale, in a wide range of industries around the world. Quietly, though, in Nagoya, Japan, Taiichi Ohno and his engineering colleagues at Toyota were perfecting what they came to call the Toyota production system, which we now know as lean production. Initially, lean was best known in the West by its tools: for example, kaizen workshops, where frontline workers solve knotty problems; kanban, the scheduling system for just-in-time production; and the andon cord, which, when pulled by any worker, causes a production line to stop. In more recent years, this early (and often superficial) understanding of lean has evolved into a richer appreciation of the power of its underlying management disciplines: putting customers first by truly understanding what they need and then delivering it efficiently; enabling workers to cont