Supply Chain View

Since posting a couple of days ago about the announcement of job cuts at Dell, I have noticed that this has already become a hot topic on the Lean blogs.

Kevin Meyer at Evolving Excellence suggests that Dell’s cost cutting is motivated by the desire to manipulate the stock price. Where others have suggested that Dell is an example of Lean, Kevin is sceptical. His opinion is that Dell’s organisational model lacks the “respect for people” element of Lean.

Mark Graban at Lean Blog also picks up on this and links to a Wall Street Journal article about HP. Mark is also unconvinced that Dell is an example of Lean. He wrote in a similar vein last year under the title “Dell is not TPS [Toyota Production System]“.

It is striking that both Graban and Meyer focus on cultural aspects, because it is this cultural side that most misunderstood or ignored in popular (mis-)conceptions of Lean. My experience is that Lean implementations don’t stick unless the culture is addressed. But whereas it’s possible to demonstrate with rigour why, for example, Pull is more effective than Push (see Hopp & Spearman*), the influence of culture is more difficult to measure.

* Factory Physics: Foundations of Manufacturing Management (2nd edition), Wallace Hopp, Mark Spearman, Irwin McGraw-Hill (2001), ISBN: 0256247951