Lean Connections

My friend David Rowell, aka The Travel Insider, writes weekly about issues related to, well, travel.  He’s not a Lean practioner in any sense of the word.  So when I pulled up today’s copy of The Travel Insider over this morning’s coffee, Davids’s point regarding Boeing’s decison earlier this week to move key production of the 787 to South Carolina struck me as pretty insightful for a guy not initiated into the intracacies of the Toyota Production System and operational excellence in general. 

Oh wait. Could this just be plain common sense thinking and not “Lean Thinking?”  Click over to David’s site to read the full newsletter (and while there sign up for it – he does some great writing), but I’ve pulled his Boeing comment into this posting without edit. So here goes.

“Meanwhile, Boeing continues to stumble along in unusual ways.  They decided to open a second production line so as to increase the rate at which they can produce their long delayed but popular 787.

Let’s see if you are smart enough to be a Boeing executive.  So you’re going to open a second production line to increase the rate at which you build 787 planes.  You have two choices of location :

The first location is right next to your present production line, which is also right next to all your other production lines too.  You’ve a massive resource of skilled labor and all the support infrastructure in place.

The second location is way over on the other coast, and is at a facility that you recently purchased and which has given you probably more problems to date in terms of what it has been doing to build sub-assemblies for the new 787 planes than any other facility in the world.  It is almost as far away from the rest of your manufacturing operation as is possible while still remaining in the US.

Which would you choose?

Well, all of you who chose the first option – bad news.  You don’t have what it takes to run Boeing.  Here’s the news of Boeing’s decision to open a second line, not in the Seattle area, but instead in SC, and here’s some analysis.

This is of course only a few years after Boeing made the extraordinarily strange decision to split off its headquarters and move that away from Seattle and instead locate in Chicago.”

‘Nuff said.

How are you changing the world today?

Two apparently unrelated (at first glance, anyway) e-mails I received this morning caught my attention.

Jim Womack (Machine That Changed the World, Lean Thinking, Lean Solutions) wrote about how General Motors must repurpose itself before it restructures.  The idea, of course, being that each organization needs customers who will derive some value from what the organization actually delivers. A restructuring to reduce costs and thereby generate profits actually doesn’t do much for the customer. As Jim puts it:

 ”What does your organization do to solve customer problems better than competitors so that customers old and new will pay good money for your services and goods and buy more over time?”

And then I read a second e-mail, a press release from Ryanair, which describes itself as “Europe’s largest low fare airline.” Ryanair has been running a contest in which passengers submit suggestions which can be turned into revenue generators for the airline. In other words, what do passengers value and what are they willing to pay good money for (in addition to the actual service of being flown from point A to point B, I suppose).  So what will Ryanair passengers shell out for?  Here are the top five items, based on the number of passenger votes received (note: O’Leary refers to Michael O’Leary – shown at right - the airline’s CEO):

1. €1 for toilet paper – with O’Leary’s face on it,
2. €2 “corkage” fee for passengers who bring their own food,
3. €5 annual subscription to access Ryanair.com,
4. €3 to smoke in a converted toilet cubicle,
5. Excess fees for overweight passengers based on body mass index.

The poll ends April 17th. I’ll be following to see which, if any, of these suggestions Ryanair actually implements. After all, what’s the point of asking for suggestions if you’re not planning to deliver on any of them?  Although I guess I’m also trying to figure out why anyone would want to pay for this stuff and what customer problems these suggestions might be solving.

Finally, is there anything GM might learn from this exercise?  We’ll leave that question for another day.