A lot of JIT and Lean concepts articulated by Deming and later Juran were in direct opposition to the Alfred Sloan models of assembly line risk reduction offered by a deep availability of components and parts at each station of the assembly process.
Sloan was deeply influenced by Ford's Charlie Sorensen who was the hands-down guru of replacing the static position auto assembly process (the builder buck) with basically dragging the automobile work-in-progress through the warehouse where the parts were. This reversal of thought gave us the serial assembly line process.
Parts availability and redundancy along the assembly line provides robustness for the goal at hand of creating a product in a reliable and predictable way but practitioners such as Ohno and Ohmae thinned out the robustness of the systems and left us with brittle concepts such as JIT, TAKT and Kaizen, to name but a few.
Great insights, Doug.
A lot of JIT and Lean concepts articulated by Deming and later Juran were in direct opposition to the Alfred Sloan models of assembly line risk reduction offered by a deep availability of components and parts at each station of the assembly process.
Sloan was deeply influenced by Ford's Charlie Sorensen who was the hands-down guru of replacing the static position auto assembly process (the builder buck) with basically dragging the automobile work-in-progress through the warehouse where the parts were. This reversal of thought gave us the serial assembly line process.
Parts availability and redundancy along the assembly line provides robustness for the goal at hand of creating a product in a reliable and predictable way but practitioners such as Ohno and Ohmae thinned out the robustness of the systems and left us with brittle concepts such as JIT, TAKT and Kaizen, to name but a few.