Lean automated manufacturing: avoiding the

pitfalls to embrace the opportunities

Hongyi Chen and Richard R. Lindeke
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth, Minnesota, USA, and
David A. Wyrick
Department of Industrial Engineering, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, USA

Abstract
Purpose – Over the last several months, the cries to become lean and low cost have echoed all the way from the halls of government to the smallest
company’s back room. In times of severe economic challenge, the natural reaction is to make decisions that can make an organization become as lean
and focused as possible. This paper aims to address these issues.
Design/methodology/approach – This paper discusses the benefits and pitfalls associated with lean manufacturing management starting from the
kernel idea that pleasing the customer should be at the root of all effort leading through the ravages of overzealous application of “lean to the max.”
Elements of lean discussed in this paper address organizational waste, human resources, distributed design, supply chain management, customer
management, and the financial system.
Findings – Potential solutions and recommendations are made to help organizations become lean yet remain committed to being centered on the
ultimate goal of customer satisfaction. These benefits and pitfalls may be seen as outcomes based on the degree to which lean is implemented.
Originality/value – This paper reviews the popular lean manufacturing environment and makes practical recommendations to new adopters to avoid
failures due to the improper application of “lean” to their organization.

Keywords Lean production, Value chain, Management strategy

Paper type General review

1. Introduction What, however, happens in the event of a sea-change as

The benefits of lean enterprise management are well-
documented. More and more companies have embraced lean
as the only way to manage their business. While the principles of
waste reduction, human optimization, distributed design, and
supply chain management has served many companies very
well, these benefits may alternatively lead to absolute failure.
The authors previously documented the “ravages” of lean
thinking taken to the limit and proposed the Temporal Think
Tank (T3e) (Lindeke et al., 2008) as a solution.
Lean management focuses on eliminating waste (non-value-
adding activities) throughout their systems. This leads
organizations to better understand their customers’ needs
and deliver what the customer wants exactly when they want
it (just-in-time). Lean has led to higher quality throughout the
production chain and design through evolution. Major
manufacturers concentrate their expertise and judiciously
outsource vital sub-components and sub-assemblies to
specialists who become critical to the supply of the final
product. By selective sharing of design/development, the lead
(lean) organization can focus resources and competencies on
a limited set of innovative ideas and reduce their direct costs
for innovating many of the components in their products.
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described in Lindeke et al. (2008), or worse yet, the failure of
a vital supplier? Only by addressing various scenarios can the
high-level organization hope to succeed, or even survive.
This may require additional personnel from the lean
company to work more closely with supplier organizations as
they struggle to make their sea change. By shifting employees
throughout the workforce, and actually working within the
other organization’s operations, many companies have learned
to survive and quickly adapt to change. This concept was, in
part the spark for the T3e. Lean management is not simply
“cutting out the fat” in an organization. Fundamentally, lean
requires taking personal responsibility for one’s work and
pleasing one’s customer, at whatever level that customer
specifies. Without distributing the work force in the value
chain, and attendant personification of the customer, all of the
lean benefits can be forfeited as a supplier worries more about
the bottom line costs and delivery schedule rather than the
receiver’s needs for quality product. This is particularly true
in difficult economic times when the extra people in the
suppliers’ or customer’s plants are “brought home” to address
local issues brought on by reducing the work force to the
“leanest” levels.
This paper explores the positive and negative aspects of a
lean philosophy. Providing this foundation exposes some
pitfalls in lean thinking. The current downward shift in the
marketplace poses important challenges to the lean paradigm.

This paper is an updated and revised version of an award winning paper

Assembly Automation
30/2 (2010) 117– 123 previously presented at Flexible Automation and Intelligent
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited [ISSN 0144-5154] Manufacturing Conference (FAIM), University of Teesside,
[DOI 10.1108/01445151011029745] Middlesbrough, UK, July 6-8, 2009.

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 Lean automated manufacturing
Hongyi Chen, Richard R. Lindeke and David A. Wyrick
Can companies apply lean in a shrinking economy, while
focusing on innovations needed for survival? In particular, this
paper suggests that organizations, to protect their value
streams, begin the effective use of business system- and
production-oriented T3e’s, develop more intelligent and
flexible manufacturing systems, redefine values to encourage
long-term, risk-taking innovation activities, and closely
support suppliers along their entire value chain.
2. Benefits and pitfalls of lean systems
While the benefits of lean practices are well-documented,
some of the negative effects of lean on employee outcomes,
work characteristics, product design, and an organization’s
innovation capability have also been studied (Lindeke et al.,
2008; Lewis, 2000; Parker, 2003; Fucini and Fucini, 1990;
Mehri, 2006). To offer researchers and practitioners an
extensive list of the potential pitfalls in the lean thinking, we
present our analysis in this section. The analysis is based on a
thorough literature review in the fields of lean manufacturing,
new product development, technology and innovation
management, and human resource management. Case
studies are also employed in our research. Besides, those
ones identified in literature (Lindeke et al., 2008; Lewis,
2000; Parker, 2003; Fucini and Fucini, 1990; Mehri, 2006),
many more issues have come to our attention as we link the
lean philosophy to other management concepts. In the
following sections, we attempt to clearly spell out the key
concepts of lean and discuss the associated pitfalls.
2.1 Reducing waste
Waste reduction is the fundamental concept in the lean
philosophy. By focusing on value-adding activities, lean
enterprises actively work to identify and eliminate different
kinds of waste, called muda in Japanese, from the system. Any
activities that consume resources but do not create value will
be considered muda, and become the subject of Kaizen
(continuous improvement) events. Wastes can include
designing wrong products that no customer wants, making
mistakes in the manufacturing process that leads to defects,
employees being left idle or waiting for deliveries during work
hours, etc. The seven categories of waste summarized in Hale
and Kubiak (2007) have a good cover of all the wastes in lean
definition, and they are listed as:
1 overproducing more items than included in customer
orders;
2 inventory due to increases of finished goods and work-in-
process;
3 motion that does not add value to the final product;
4 waiting for any resource throughout the flow of design and
production;
5 transportation or the additional movement that is not of
value to the product;
6 over-processing or additional steps that do not increase
the overall value of the product; and
7 not being right the first time or the costs and time
associated with repairing and correcting a product.
Correct identification of muda and successful elimination of
them leads to reduced manufacturing cost, higher product
quality, improved customer satisfaction, and increased profits.
However, in reducing waste and focusing on value-adding
activities, a company may focus on obvious short-term benefits
and ignore long-term competitive advantages. Since the return
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on investment for many innovations is very difficult to quantify
when the ideas first take shape, especially before the potential
market has been clearly identified and developed, it is very likely
that those ideas, especially the ones offering particularly long-
term contributions, will be considered non-value-adding and
thus be cut-off.
Even before ideas get generated, the time and effort that are
necessary to spark innovation may also be eliminated as waste
in a lean system. It should be noted that when the lean concepts
were first developed in Toyota Company by Taiichi Ohno, time
was set aside periodically for the worker teams to get together
and suggest ways to improve the system (Womack et al., 2007).
These “creative times” are highly valuable in keeping the
teams, and hence the organization, innovative and to
continuously improve the manufacturing process. However,
as lean practices reach the extreme, the shrinking size of the
workforce and the busy schedules of employees who have
multiple responsibilities will make it much harder to get
workers together for formal discussions, much less casual chats
that may spark innovative changes.
In addition, in order to identify non-value-adding activities,
value should be clearly understood and defined. In lean
thinking, it is emphasized that value can only be defined by
the end-users (Womack and Jones, 2003). Customers’ needs
and wants should be followed closely in product design and
manufacturing. Any products or features that the current
customers do not want will be considered muda since they do
not generate revenues in the current market. This approach is
expected to continuously and incrementally improve products
and increase customer satisfaction, especially in a market pull
situation. However, it may hinder radical innovations that
create technology push opportunities and cause companies to
stumble upon disruptive innovations. A disruptive technology
is a new technology or new application that usually
underperforms in area(s) most desired by the mainstream
customers, at least in the short-term, but with other valuable
features and great potential to develop, the technology can
eventually better more established technologies and dominate
the market. As noted in Christensen (2006), blindly following
customers’ demand may lead a company to focus on
technology development that overshoots customers’ demand
and lose the market to disruptive technologies that had been
initially denied by the same group of customers. Therefore,
exclusively following customers’ definition of value and the
elimination of all “non-value” adding activities can lead a lean
company to failures because customers can be wrong, or at
least short-sighted.
2.2 Human resource management
The second keystone to the lean philosophy is to “respect
the workers” since they are the knowledge resources in the
system. As discussed above, slack in lean systems are
continuously identified and removed as muda. Slack on
the human resource side mean unused work time and excess
workers. Increasing worker utilization and reducing the size of
the workforce usually lead to reduced manufacturing costs.
However, stress is also created in the work environment from
“crazy” schedules and multiple responsibilities. In certain
situations, stress may drive “creative tensions” that stimulate
employees’ creativity (Oldham and Cummings, 1996).
However, too much stress is more likely to stifle employees’
creative thinking. As noted in Silverthorne (2002), most
people cannot function effectively in a time crunch for long
 Lean automated manufacturing
Hongyi Chen, Richard R. Lindeke and David A. Wyrick
periods without burning out, even if they have a sense of being
on an important mission and being challenged. Therefore,
even though the jobs in a mature lean system are supposed to
make employees feel important and challenged and thus
greatly respected by the company, workers will not be able to
innovate when they have been under too much stress for too
long. Typically, when a company becomes leaner and leaner, a
naturally expected result is layoffs. Unlike workers in Japan,
where lean manufacturing originated, workers in the West do
not have the luxury of a lifetime employment guarantee. As a
result, lack of job security constitutes another source of
employee stress in lean enterprises. For employees in Western
lean companies, a conflict exists between the fear of losing
jobs and the need to accomplish more with less people while
continuously eliminating excess workers. This probably
explains, why critics renamed lean manufacturing “mean
manufacturing” or “management by stress” (Parker, 2003).
Just because of being lean, the company runs the risk of
being fragile in situations when many workers call in sick or
choose to go on strike. In either case, not enough people will
be there to cover the jobs; work will be delayed dramatically
and quality may suffer. With “just enough” people who are
very much stressed and in many cases pushed to the limit,
a lean system can hardly respond to such emergencies.
Employees in a lean company are trained and expected to take
on multiple responsibilities. Since everyone can perform every
job to some degree, the flexibility of the system is increased.
During times when sales decrease, instead of waiting for orders
beside the assembly line, primary engineers, and assemblers are
expected to transform themselves into salespeople and go out to
talk to potential customers to create sales. However, as a
tradeoff, employees may lose special expertise as they change
roles frequently. In traditional organizations, the career ladder
is designed to allow employees to gain a depth of knowledge in
one special area first and then expand their expertise (Bennett,
1996). It is important to develop expertise in an area since it is
essential to have expertise in order to innovate in such an area,
and broad understanding of different areas will be a plus that
sometimes stimulates innovations. In lean environments, if the
job responsibilities are shared too broadly and shifted too
often, the employees may never get a chance to deepen their
understanding and keep up with the development of
technologies in any area. This will eventually negatively affect
the capability of an organization to innovate and can even lead
to a regression in retained organizational knowledge.
One of the cases that the authors considered when examining
the potential pitfalls of a lean workforce is a university
department that has been short of teaching resources for
several years. To survive increasing student enrollment with a
“lean” faculty group, many members have to take the
responsibility of continuously teaching new courses, some of
which are not in their direct or closely related areas of expertise.
At the same time, the average teaching load and the service load
have also been increased. Time to perform research and
innovate, either with their classes or in departmental outlook
has been largely taken instead by developing course materials
and preparing for lectures. The innovation rate, measured by
publications in this context, can only be seen to decrease.
2.3 Distributed design
Distributed design characterizes, the product design and
manufacturing strategies in lean companies. In fact, Japanese
lean car producers design and provide detailed drawings of only
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30 percent of the parts in their cars, the rest are distributed to its
first-tier suppliers, who usually have expertise in process
engineering and plant operations (Womack et al., 2007). In this
way, the responsibilities of manufacturing are mostly shifted to
suppliers. The lean producers become focused on the overall
design of product and the final assembly of parts being
engineered and produced by different suppliers. This approach
agrees with the economic theory that distributing jobs to the
most efficient parties increases overall social welfare. By
focusing on product design and final assembly while
aggressively outsourcing parts, lean companies are able to
steadily decrease the unit cost of products. However, since most
major parts are outsourced as a “turnkey” project to suppliers,
the lean producers are barely involved in manufacturing of
many, and often key, components of their products. As a result,
the company’s own ability to design, debug, and improve
manufacturing systems, or even large segments of their
products will decrease.
For a company that wants to achieve product leadership, it is
critical to maintain and strengthen its manufacturing ability.
This is linked to a third cornerstone of lean: being agile where
this agility helps develop from the strength of design and
manufacturing knowledge and facilitates bringing innovative
products to market quickly. Designing high-quality products
and low-cost manufacturing is an important part. When
incremental changes to modules/parts no longer lead to overall
product improvement, the relationships among the product
components and core concepts may need to be reconfigured
(Henderson and Clark, 1990). In such a situation,
manufacturing processes for new designs will need to be
created, assessed, and improved. The Toyota Company in
Japan tries to maintain a long-term relationship with its
suppliers and helps them improve manufacturing by loaning/
switching its engineers through the supplier companies. This
approach promotes communication and knowledge sharing
between producers and suppliers to a great degree. However,
to solve the fundamental problem, a company will need a
strong incentive and great commitment of time and efforts to
understand and be involved in major suppliers’ manufacturing
process.
Another tradeoff to distributed design when parts are
mostly outsourced is that the innovations from internal
product research and development (R&D) at a company may
flow out to competitors too quickly, even before the company
can benefit fully. Since most suppliers provide parts to
multiple customers, to reduce cost, suppliers are likely to
provide parts that are similar, if not the same, to each
customer. Even if there are agreements in place to keep trade
secrets, other customers of the same supplier may “smell”
innovations from the parts or assemblies they receive or
conversations with the supplier’s representatives.
2.4 Supply chain management
In the lean supply chain, parts from suppliers arrive shortly
before they are needed since excess inventories were
eliminated as waste. This approach saves storage space and
costs, and improves efficiencies. However, with no reserve
stocks, the system will stop running if parts do not arrive on
time or a faulty shipment comes. This happened in the early
stage when General Motors (GM) tried to embrace the lean
philosophy in its Pontiac assembly plant in Pontiac, Michigan.
Since all the buffers and inventories had been removed, a
failure of a shipment from its supplier, in this case the Flint
 Lean automated manufacturing
Hongyi Chen, Richard R. Lindeke and David A. Wyrick
plant nearby, caused the entire plant in Pontiac to shut down
and they had to send the workforce home 4 h early with a loss
in production of product that was slated to flow to the
customer (Womack and Jones, 2003). Although this issue is
supposed to be solved by the supporting organizational
structures that are constructed, there is no guarantee that a
late or faulty shipment will not happen in a mature lean
system. Supply problems become more likely when financial
crises affect every component of the economy, as we find
today. Since large complex parts of the product are “sole-
sourced” in lean-supply systems, the failure of a supplier,
especially a first-tier supplier, can be fatal to the company.
Strikes at different levels of the supply chain will also have a
significant negative effect on production at the lean company.
One need only consider, the problems at GM when a supplier
of airbags went into bankruptcy and no longer provide
products to them, or would even release GM’s tooling to
move it to a different supplier (Detroit News, 2008). The 1998
strikes in two of GM’s part supplier factories in Flint,
Michigan, that caused 26 out of 29 North American assembly
plants to close down and lay off nearly half of GM’s workforce
(Bradsher, 1998) is another good example that without
buffers, failure of any link on the lean supply chain will cause
the whole chain to fall like dominos.
One of the prime driving ideas that most companies adopt
when they begin their conversion to lean management is to
consolidate their vendor list. Since there is a cost associated
with keeping communication channels open to vendors, even
if they are not Tier 1 or even regular suppliers, most lean
companies view extra vendors as muda. Reduction in vendors
can save resources; however, it can also limit innovation. One
of the authors spent time with a lean manufacturer recently
and observed an unfortunate issue as the engineering staff
explored a new quality process. The engineers had identified a
promising new measuring device but they were unable to
purchase it for testing because the vendor was not “on the
approved list”! This led to a significant delay and additional
expense for bringing innovation into the company. Surely, this
was an unexpected, but often observed, consequence of the
effect of vendor and supply chain control in lean enterprises.
2.5 Customer management
In the Japanese Toyota system, a large workforce is maintained
to deal with customer management. Japanese buyers usually
purchase a new car about every four years, due in large part to a
governmental policy that requires very expensive and very
demanding vehicle inspections as a car ages. In order to
maximize the total income from a customer over the long-term,
the sales department in Toyota devotes a significant, and costly,
effort to keep good long-term relationships with every customer
(Womack et al., 2007). Keeping every customer’s information
in a database and calling them frequently will instill customer
loyalty and make it difficult for competitors to gain a share in the
Japanese market.
Compared with customers in Japan, people in other
countries do not have to purchase new cars as often in the
absence of strict government regulations dealing with the
inspection of aging vehicles. Therefore, maintaining a life-
time relationship with customers seems much less important
in those markets. A lean system would likely view a large
workforce dedicated to customer management as a waste,
thus, will train and expect the customer service personnel to
perform other jobs. As mentioned in Womack et al. (2007),
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during a visit to the Toyota Company, the authors were told
that the external relationship manager was too busy to meet
with them since he was doing some assembling. In the same
way, the experts that used to analyze and communicate
customers’ needs may be moved to other jobs and become too
busy with more obvious or urgent work, including assembly.
By this action in the long-term, knowledge and expertise
needed to managing customer interaction will be lost.
2.6 Financial system
While the shadow pricing strategy is used in both lean and
mass production companies, lean companies tend to use it
more aggressively. Figure 1 shows an example: both lean and
mass production companies set the selling prices: at $20,000
and 30,000, respectively, lower than the actual initial
manufacturing and development cost ($50,000), expecting
the learning curve effect and economies of scale will drop the
average unit cost if the sales reach the projected five million
units volume. Both companies decrease the product price one
or a few times as their products enter into a later stage in the
life cycle to beat competitors and better penetrate the market.
The main difference is that the lean company tries to set the
selling price lower than the price of the mass product
company and much lower than its actual initial cost, hoping
that by applying lean practices, the unit manufacturing cost
will drop more quickly and dramatically as more customers
are attracted to purchase the product. It is reasoned that
profits gained later through expanded market share will soon
compensate for the losses incurred in the beginning of a
product’s life. Increasing sales to the point that early losses
can be compensated for therefore quickly and continuously
reducing costs by effective lean practices throughout the
process are critical for the survival of a lean company. While
the aggressive shadow pricing strategy encourages initial
purchases and can succeed in an expanding market, applying
it in a shrinking market, without being able to differentiate
one’s product through superior features and quality from its
competitors will, likely, only expedite the fall of the company.
Simply being cheap is not the answer to sustaining success:
innovation and technological advancements are the ultimate
driving forces of product leadership.
2.7 Summary of lean pitfalls
Table I summarizes the lean concepts and the potential
failures that they may lead to, as discussed in the previous
sections.
Figure 1 Shadow pricing strategy as employed by lean organizations
Manufacturing unit cost
$50K
$30K
$20K
Selling
Price
30K 50K 1M 5M
Manufacturing volume
Mass production Lean production
Manufacturing cost
Product price
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Table I Summary of lean pitfalls

Lean concepts in Pitfalls
Eliminate all wastes Companies may:
Eliminate the creative times that are necessary to innovations
Focus on short-term value-adding activities and lose long-term competitive capability through radical innovations
Miss technology-push opportunities
Stumble over disruptive innovations
Create more stresses in the work environment and make employees lose the feeling of job security
Multiple job responsibilities Employees may lose expertise in their special areas
Distributed design Companies may lose the ability to design, debug, and improve the manufacturing system of the parts
Parts designed and manufactured in different places may not match
Opportunities to develop radical and architectural innovations will be eliminated
Internal innovations may flow out too fast before the company can benefit from its R&D
Lean supply chain Late and faulty shipment of parts will stop the system
The failure of a first-tier suppliers are fatal
Effects of strikes on different levels of the supply chain will be amplified
Customer management Customer satisfaction may be lost in the long-term as a result of the busy schedules and multiple responsibilities
of customer analyst
Financial management The use of shadow pricing strategy may lead to total failure in a shrinking economy
Cross-ownership and interlocking equity with each other in the lean group may expedite the fall of the whole group
in a crisis

3. Solutions to maximize the benefits of lean
For a company to maximize the benefits of its lean practices,
special attention must be paid to the pitfalls discussed above.
While it is not the purpose of this paper to offer an exclusive
list of solutions, a few are suggested.
When one reviews a company that has a strong survival
instinct, often we find that they have embraced the ability to be
agile and flexible in their product design and manufacturing
environment. This agility is linked to their innovative spirit and
is vested into the establishment of independent organizations,
like those espoused by the author’s in the T3e (Lindeke et al.,
2008). When economic conditions become difficult, as in the
current worldwide economic crisis, it is the companies who
have agile philosophies that can succeed. Thus, at least as it
views the future, an organization must drop strict adherence to
the Lean mantra of “its muda” to carve out its future by finding
time to reflect and study for products that will allow it to
flourish in the recovery period that is ahead. Creating an
independent organization, like T3e (Lindeke et al., 2008),
with a cost structure not honed to achieve high-profit margin in
the current market is also a solution for companies to harness
disruptive innovations without affecting the lean nature of the
parent company.
To cultivate an innovation-encouraging culture in a lean
company, it is important to define value in the way that
innovation-driving activities are viewed so as not to be
considered muda. Setting aside some creative times not only
helps reduce job anxiety and get employees re-energized, but
also provides opportunities for the employees to interact and
stimulate out-of-the-box thinking. Defining value effectively
also calls for a positive attitude toward risk taking. As
emphasized in an interview by Jeff Immelt, CEO of General
Electric (GE), it is important for an organization to make it
“ok” to take risks and devote time and efforts to certain
activities that do not produce results in a short-term (Business
Week, 2005). An R&D portfolio that builds both short- and
long-term competitiveness will better prepare a lean company
to stand out in fierce competition. As an essential part of the
lean system, workers should be respected and involved as
much as possible in the decision-making process. In this way,
a sense of importance, enjoyment, and satisfaction will be
provided to motivate employees’ creativities.
Given the advantage of being flexible, a lean company
should be able to respond to changes more effectively if
contingency plans are developed ahead of their absolute need.
Therefore, besides ensuring competitiveness through
continuous innovations, the company also wants to closely
monitor and forecast the market demand and technology
trends, assess its own competitive advantages, conduct
sensitivity analysis, and generate scenario analyses. A variety
of decision analysis tools are available to facilitate such
activities and sharpen decision-makers’ judgment (Chen et al.,
2009; Gerdsri and Kocaoglu, 2007; Millett and Honton,
1991; Yoon and Park, 2007). What the companies need to do
is to select and adopt suitable ones to maximize their benefits.
In addition, to better cope with uncertainties and disruptions
in the dynamic market environment, more intelligent and
flexible manufacturing systems are needed, especially for the
companies in which tooling and equipment require large
capital investment. Flexible product platforms can be
designed to effectively share common components and
deliberately project uncertainties into flexible elements that
are carryover-modified in different product families or
product generations. In this way, the need of redesign as
well as changes in manufacturing tooling and equipment will
be minimized in an event of new product introduction.
Details about the systematic process of flexible product
platform design can be found in Suh et al. (2007).
Owing to the strong dependencies of a lean company on its
suppliers, it is critical for the lean company to support those
suppliers. This calls for more transparent financial systems
and cash flows along the chain, since the system is only as
strong as the weakest component of the whole chain. In the
unfortunate incident stated above, with the failure of a key
supplier, one can only wonder if cost control tactics by GM

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were not ultimately to blame in the failure. Surely, squeezing a
few more cents out of the cost of the product each year for the
last few years, as its market share shrank, did little to improve
the sales picture for GM but could have sealed the collapse of
this supplier. With better foresight this cash strapped supplier,
who was likely unable to support innovation, could have been
saved and could have begun to deliver even better products to
GM in the future. GM could have provided assistance,
perhaps by increasing its prices by a few dollars per vehicle
and passing the added revenue directly back to its struggling
supply chain with a very small impact of its number of sales
over the short-term. This would be clearly seen as a “shadow
pricing” initiative that would have reaped huge benefit into
the future.
Any organization, regardless of where it lies along the road
to lean, can open itself to clearly explain its financial condition
to its partners. It can share difficulties and build long-term
trust, strength, and a healthful and supportive relationship, as
suggested by the Japanese Lean Manufacturers, rather than
creating legal adversaries as has happened here.
Closely working with the suppliers also helps the lean
company to keep up with the most recent developments in
manufacturing technologies. This may require additional
personnel from the lean company to work in supplier
companies; however, it is critical for the company to maintain
its ability in designing and debugging the manufacturing
system, and to optimize the whole value chain. By shifting
employees throughout the workforce, and actually working
within the other organization’s operations, many companies
have learned to survive. This concept was, in part the spark for
the T3e introduced by the authors in an earlier paper (Lindeke
et al., 2008). The fundamental and controlling underpinnings
of lean management are based on taking personal responsibility
for one’s work and pleasing one’s customer, at whatever level
that customer has specified. Without having a work force that is
distributed along the value chain, and this attendant
personification of the customer, all of the benefits of lean can
end at the shipping dock with a supplier worrying about the
bottom line costs and delivery schedule rather than the
receiver’s needs for quality product. Therefore, in difficult
economic times when the company’s initial reaction would be
to bring the extra people in the suppliers or customer’s plants
“back home” to address local needs as the work force is whittled
down to the “leanest” levels, this is often the worst means to
address the problems posed by hard economic times.
4. Conclusion
Lean enterprise management aims to eliminate waste,
effectively manage personnel, distribute design among
entities that are best at each stage, work with the supply
chain, manage customers, and wisely manage the
organization’s finances. In each activity, the focus is to
eliminate muda, or waste.
For each of these elements of lean, examples have been
provided in this paper to warn against the zealous over-
application of lean. Taken beyond a moderate, reasonable level,
lean will actually decrease the organization’s ability to compete.
In times of great economic stress, implementing lean
management as much as possible is an understandable
reaction, but it may ultimately insure the failure of the
organization rather than save it. The authors have offered
advice to the newly lean organization to avoid many of the
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pitfalls of “overzealous lean” to become a stronger competitor
for having survived the on going, or in fact any, financial crisis.
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Corresponding author
Richard R. Lindeke can be contacted at: rlindek1@d.umn.
edu

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