Lean vs cheap

The last 4 companies I've worked for all claimed to be "lean". They applied it to their staffing, not necessarily to manufacturing processes. 

But I just think they were cheap. 

They like the idea that they reduced "waste" in the payroll, but it always looked like they were short-handed. There were never quite enough people to do the job well. Everyone was expected to do a bit of everything as needed, but it meant pretty much no one was a specialist or really talented at one thing. 

It also meant there was no reward for efficiency. Getting your job done early just meant you'd have to go fill the time doing someone else's job. 

My take on lean manufacturing (and therefore lean hiring, etc) is that it is NOT about avoiding spending money, it's about spending it effectively looking for a long term reward.

I feel like there are a lot of companies out there that want to claim to be "lean", but they are just cheap. 

Discuss...

I've been in a lean company, a not cheap or lean company, and now a company that is way too lean but not due to cheapness. 

My last company was a mid-size bank. We were what I would call lean. In general, we'd be working about 40-45 hours a week, with some weeks that were closer to 30, and more closer to 50. For a few months we had numerous weeks in a row of 60 hour weeks. When someone went on vacation, the rest of us knew how to pick up the slack. Sure, there was enough redundancy/waste, but that is natural in a company that size (1500 employees).

The previous company was one that everyone on this board has heard of, and I'd guess at least 75% of this board (maybe even closer to 80%) has dealt with directly. It was not lean or cheap. Well run, but with as many projects and overhead and everything else, being lean or cheap would lead to disaster once you get that big. Sure, individual departments were, but they were quick to hire someone if necessary. Many hours were spent on the cell phone or on the internet. 

My current company is wayyy too lean, but not cheap--we're just [effectively] a start up and it takes time. We have the right steps in place to move closer to the "lean" mark than the cheap mark, but it will take time. Check back with me in 3 months, we'll see if I'm still singing the same tune. 

Lean done well is an incredible environment where everyone has the tools they need to do their job, their jobs are neatly defined, and you have the ability to understand if you had a good day or not on the spot.

Done not well... It's just someone telling you to bring your own pens from home.

Here's a 90 second video on what lean should be.

https://youtu.be/wfsRAZUnonI

In reply to mtn :

That's a good perspective. 

Lean is fine and there is something to be said for cutting back staffing in a lot of areas.  Stupid is a bigger problem with poor management of skills and personnel.  Uneven workload will lead to feelings of resentment among employees and that is usually lazy management. 

In reply to Fueled by Caffeine :

Good feedback (although your video was unavailable)

In reply to SVreX :

here's another link  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfsRAZUnonI&feature=youtu.be

Fueled by Caffeine said:

Lean done well is an incredible environment where everyone has the tools they need to do their job, their jobs are neatly defined, and you have the ability to understand if you had a good day or not on the spot.

 

Done not well... It's just someone telling you to bring your own pens from home.

 

From my current company, I came in, they gave me a weekly project. I did it once, told my boss that I (a) needed a new computer, and (b) needed a new program. It took a while, and two reminders, but three weeks later I had a new computer and the new programs. I now spend 4 hours on this project instead of 10. 

My last company, we were big enough that things could get bogged down in committee, but if it was important enough you could raise the alarms and get it barked up the tree until the person with the kill switch would just make the decision. It worked well. 

The company before that, again, gigantic, had everything... but since they had to pay license fees, you didn't necessarily get access to it--had to make a big business case. PITA. 

We run a pretty lean ship.  There are 5 of us - 3 registered architects, 1 about to be, and 1 new guy draftsman.  No support staff, because we don't generate enough clerical work to justify it (and based on every admin I've ever given stuff to, I can do a better job more quickly myself anyway).  Small office, fairly well equipped.  The bosses try to skimp a tad on certain software, but that's mostly it.  I can't complain too much.

The last place I worked was a big corporate firm, part of a national group of companies.  It was cheap.  Staff meetings were specifically scheduled at lunch time so at least one of the hours was on your time, not theirs.  If work was slow, you were expected to take vacation days.  When work was heavy, you were expected to do unpaid OT.

The real mark of cheapness - they decided to eliminate nearly every overhead position.  This was from an office of 100 or so, which justified having a handful of admins around, and needed a marketing staff.  They actually cost themselves money in the long run by going that route. 

And the stupidest cheapout of all: there was an older guy who had been there for 20+ years.  He was the hardest working, most loyal, most conscientious employee you could ever hope for.  He was a general purpose workman who did everything from light maintenance to document production to IT to... literally whatever the company needed him to, any time, anywhere.  He did more to keep that place running efficiently than any 2 other people did.  But he wasn't billable, so he had to go.  Short-sighted in the extreme.

In my last week of work a long time ago we had a new head of the company start. He came to give us a pep talk. He stated "one of the reasons we excel is that we hire the best people". I raised my hand and said "this part of the industry pays 2/3 of what the other part of the industry pays, we're getting the best of the people that weren't good enough to get hired by them"

I was not popular, but I'd already quit, so it was kind of fun. I see that in a lot of industries. You don't get the best, if you're lucky you might get the best guy who isn't good enough to go work somewhere else. They seem happy with that, so I guess it works. 

I once had a boss (who was a complete idiot in many more ways than just this) who tried to explain lean business to me. It went:

Him: We need to run this operation leaner.

Me: What do you mean?

Him: I can't believe you don't know what lean business is. You know, lean, like everything you think lean means except when it comes to how much someone weighs. Yeah, lean.

That was literally all he had, and I'm paraphrasing only because I don't remember the exact sentence, but that is almost exactly what he said.

This was a guy who was brought in because our little startup was bought by a bigger company. I was the only sales guy, the new company ownership brought in their own CEO and that CEO brought in this 'lean' guy to be my manager. New CEO and 'lean' guy took the company from "50+ employees and growing" to "lost all customers except the main one that owns half our company and turnover rates of higher than 100% annually" in less than 8 months. I did out last the new CEO and the lean guy, but the damage was done. The CEO was pushed out about 3 months later (end of 2015), but his LinkedIn account still says he is the CEO at the company.

I learned a lot from lean/six sigma/5S training. Apparently the management (who were in the same courses as I) didn't.

It was an excellent observation of the Peter Principle in real life. Taking a good system and turning it into a penny pinching mess.

I once had to sit with a clipboard counting operator steps for 3 hours for lean training.  I ended up moving 2 buttons on the machinery and saved them something like 45 minutes a day.

Properly lean makes things more efficient. Corporately implemented lean usually is less efficient. In my organization lean meetings are 30 people for an hour a week discussing how we can each save 15 minutes in our work week.

We refer to this at work as the difference between lean and anorexic (though cheap is probably a better descriptor.)

In my 4+ years here, we have increasingly trended towards the latter and eliminated a number of overhead positions. When I started here, we had 4 of us in the engineering department, which grew to 5 the following year. 4 was about right for our workload and 5 was probably too much, especially considering the 5th guy was about worthless anyways, but that got cut to 2 at the beginning of '16 and stayed there until we hired a third guy last month. It's been challenging at times, to say the least. I just got through about a 2 month period in which I was working 60+ hour weeks solely on one project, no time to deal with anything else and no one to push the work to. Out of necessity, something is going to suffer. 

They like the idea that they reduced "waste" in the payroll, but it always looked like they were short-handed. There were never quite enough people to do the job well. Everyone was expected to do a bit of everything as needed, but it meant pretty much no one was a specialist or really talented at one thing. 

This rings very true to me in a lot of ways and is something I struggle with a bit in my own professional development. I consciously sought a small company environment in part to gain a lot of exposure to many different areas of running a manufacturing business, which I definitely have and I think has been beneficial at this stage in my career, but I'm also not an expert in any one thing. In the back of my mind I am always wondering at what point does that start to become a detriment to my career going forward. I'm still happy with where I am and what I'm doing for now, but it's probably going to burn me out at some point as well.

Another issue we have with limited staffing is that you don't always have duplication of particular skill sets, so if the one guy who knows something well is out or has his time booked, the task either gets put off or has to be outsourced ($$$). My counterpart isn't very strong in tooling design, for example, so with my time completely booked during my last project he ended up having to outsource multiple fixtures we could have otherwise designed and built internally at probably 1/5 the cost or less.

SVreX said:

My take on lean manufacturing (and therefore lean hiring, etc) is that it is NOT about avoiding spending money, it's about spending it effectively looking for a long term reward.

Sounds more like long-term thinking. I've only ever heard "lean" used in the context of business as a euphemism for "unrepentant cheap bastardry."

Jumper K Balls said:

I learned a lot from lean/six sigma/5S training. Apparently the management (who were in the same courses as I) didn't.

It was an excellent observation of the Peter Principle in real life. Taking a good system and turning it into a penny pinching mess.

 

I once had to sit with a clipboard counting operator steps for 3 hours for lean training.  I ended up moving 2 buttons on the machinery and saved them something like 45 minutes a day.

The tools of lean/6 sigma/5 S are excellent, it's how they get applied a lot of the time that sucks. We've had some very eye opening exercises in training sessions here, like earlier this year when we identified a part that was traveling over 5.5 miles start to finish within our building (and our facility is NOT that big, just lots of back and forth nonsense) just because processes were laid out in a stupid order for stupid reasons. I've been wanting to do Greenbelt training for like 3 years now, but every time the opportunity comes up either money gets tight or I get handed some other big PITA project that eats all my time. 

We do LEAN at my company -here are the 8 waste categories

TIMWOODS

Transportation/Inventory/Waiting/Overproduction/Overprocessing/Defects/Specifications (not related to customer requirements)

Comes from Japan and from a time of shortages where all wasted effort and cost had to be minimized.

Great concept but cannot overcome shortsighted, old school or just plain bad management. Not intended to starve/cut to the bare bone but eliminate  or streamline what is not adding value. 

In my observation of it, Six Sigma means $1200 / hour worth of management sitting in a conference room for 2 hours chasing an idea that will save $500 once around and around in circles.

Duke said:

In my observation of it, Six Sigma means $1200 / hour worth of management sitting in a conference room for 2 hours chasing an idea that will save $500 once around and around in circles.

Lean is simplifying and eliminating waste.

Six Sigma is attempting to achieve perfection by eliminating variation.

What you are describing is somebody using the wrong tool for the job....

GameboyRMH said:

SVreX said:

My take on lean manufacturing (and therefore lean hiring, etc) is that it is NOT about avoiding spending money, it's about spending it effectively looking for a long term reward.

Sounds more like long-term thinking. I've only ever heard "lean" used in the context of business as a euphemism for "unrepentant cheap bastardry."

You are describing theory vs reality. The theory of lean has a lot to do with long-term thinking (consider Toyota  spending millions to modernize manufacturing lines and increase efficiencies- "just in time" manufacturing, etc)

The reality gets much closer to cheap bastardry all too often. And when it does, owners and management tend to pat themselves on the back and say "we are lean". 

Just wait for them to jump on the human performance bandwagon too. Ugh.

In reply to SVreX :

I used to live in Georgetown KY where the Camry is assembled (and most of the town worked).  Toyota took (and takes) the obsession with efficiency and "just in time" to extremes.  My neighbor was one of the managers of JIT and would tell me of the absurd lengths the company had to go to in order to avoid stockpiling.  (chartering private planes to bring in supplies when a glitch occurred in the chain)  There are so many moving parts to assembling cars that a shortage of one component would throw the whole system into chaos.  I suppose it worked but it was stressful for the people involved.

By this definition the company i currently work for would be lean. 2 bays, 2 guys to work, 1 courtesy person and the owner/manager is service writer. It works really well but gets a bit hectic if were real busy. Occasionally sucks because the part timers tend to quit often. (They cover 21 hours a week and it pays minimum wage).

The place i worked before this was cheap in every sense of the word. Hiring and equipment wise and it was more strenous/dangerous work. Ill never work for a cheap company again.

oldopelguy said:

Just wait for them to jump on the human performance bandwagon too. Ugh.

It's about time the business world admitted that it never really gave up on Taylorism.