Review: Easier, Simpler, Faster: Systems Strategy for Lean IT

Matthew Smith

Easier, Simpler, Faster: Systems Strategy for Lean IT by Jean Cunningham and Duane Jones focuses on the Information Technology (IT) issues faced in the lean transformation of Lantech, a packaging company in Louisville, Kentucky. Lantech is a familiar icon in the lean manufacturing world because it was prominently featured in the popular Lean Thinking text by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones. Easier, Simpler, Faster differentiates itself from that text by focusing on the specific IT decisions and lessons-learned that were discovered during the company's lean transformation.

In Easier, Simpler, Faster, the authors propose thirteen guiding principles for a lean IT company to follow. For brevity's sake, these principles are including in Appendix A. The principles focus on common themes in lean thinking including standardization, commonality, productivity, and reduction of waste. The principles also provide guidance on issues unique to IT such as limiting keystrokes for power users, automation strategies, data mining, and storage. The role of the guiding principles is to help a company develop an information system that supports lean changes and captures vital information in all value streams so that it can be shared and leveraged by all (Cunningham and Jones 132).

A major focus of the book was on systems-specific decisions made during the company's lean transformation. The most important of these decisions concerned the procurement of hardware and software. Following the guiding principles, the authors suggest that when purchasing hardware and software that a company focus on standardization and commonality. Standardization is done by centralizing the purchasing decisions and limiting the variety of configurations. This allows the company to save money in the procurement process and simplify the maintenance and repairs for the machines. The configurations are chosen by involving users in the discovery process. Decisions are weighted toward choosing software tools that are shared across the company. Common tools - such as Word, Excel, and the Windows file system - are chosen over department-specific tools when they adequately meet the needs of the user. Commonality helps reduce waste by limiting configurations and compatibility problems. It also allows people to more easily share files across the company - increasing the availability of information.

Of the software and hardware decisions, the most important to a manufacturing company is in the choice of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. When choosing an ERP system, the authors suggest choosing a system that works well with the company's culture. They suggest talking to the technicians behind the products, rather than the salespeople. This allows the decision makers to more easily determine if the software will adapt to the company's needs. During the discovery process, it is important to determine whether the company plans on implementing a vanilla (out-of-box) implementation of the ERP or customizing the ERP to meet the company's needs. Both solutions are feasible, but have their tradeoffs. Implementing a vanilla implementation, allows the company to easily upgrade to new technology when it is available, and also requires less support from the vendor. However, the vanilla solution might not fit well with the company's existing processes. A customized solution makes up for the shortcomings of the vanilla solution by allowing the company to modify the application as they see fit. However, this benefit comes with the cost of difficult upgrades and higher development expenses in the future. Lantech chose to customize the product, but only in high-value areas. This required more support for the vendor; however, the authors felt that the benefits in flexibility more than made up for the additional cost.

One of the high-value areas in the ERP system that required customization at Lantech was the Material Resource Planning (MRP) package. In traditional companies, the MRP system performs all the scheduling, planning, and material procurement for manufacturing. However, in lean production many of these functions are not needed. The authors found that through the use of takt time, scheduling was simplified and did not require a complex package. Instead, scheduling was done based on how many people were needed to produce the required product for that day. As a result, scheduling was dropped from the MRP system. The material procurement package was also affected by lean thinking. Through the use of kanban almost 90% of all material was ordered based on a visual card system. Rather than try to integrate kanban into the MRP, Lantech separated this process entirely. As a result, the MRP now ordered only 10% of material that was not ordered via kanban. The authors stated that they considered dropping MRP entirely; however, they found that it benefiting the company when exceptions arose such as damaged goods, engineering changes, cancelled orders, or sudden orders (Cunningham and Jones 99). For Lantech, the MRP was delegated to becoming a safety net rather than a key factor in the manufacturing process.

The example of the MRP system is symbolic of the role IT plays in the lean company. The authors describe IT as a support mechanism for lean production. It is meant to facilitate communication and not hamper the progress that the company makes. At Lantech, IT was the last area of the business that was studied by the company's lean process team. It was only done when IT became a barrier to eliminating waste at the company. The authors note that this is important because IT reflects the processes of the company. If the company's processes are not lean, than IT cannot be lean.

The authors conclude the book with some key lessons they learned in aligning IT with lean thinking. They found that team building was one of the most important aspects of transforming IT. By bringing together team members from across the company, they were able to make better decisions and help facilitate a culture of trust at Lantech. This open spirit in decision making was reinforced by providing open access to information across the company. The access to open information empowered employees to make better decisions and expand their roles in the company. After the lean transformation, the authors found that like other areas that had undergone a lean transformation, IT began to develop a new role in the company. Rather than simply reacting to requests for changes, IT was now a proactive member of the company that could reach out and partner with the company's key value streams to produce enhancements. Solutions that came out of IT were now deeply rooted in the company's processes. The IT staff was capturing better information and providing the correct enhancements the first time.

Easier, Simpler, Faster: Systems Strategy for Lean IT provides a glimpse into the issues concerning IT that affect a company undergoing a lean transformation. The book, itself, is well written and provides interesting examples. For the area of manufacturing, this book is an invaluable resource for choosing and implementing an ERP system. For all of IT, the thirteen guiding principles can serve as a basis for starting a lean transformation. My main criticism of the book is that it is a little short sighted. It does not delve into applying lean principles to the process of developing software. I purchased the book expecting it to describe implementing lean processes in IT. I wanted to learn how kanban and value stream mapping could work within software development. This book, however, did not cover any specific implementation of lean thinking in respect to IT. In fact, the book describes IT as not having any direct value stream. This is true for Lantech; however, this is not the case for most companies. Business-to-consumer and business-to-business e-commerce provides a direct value stream tied to information systems. The management of this value stream is as important to most companies as Lantech's core manufacturing process. It is for these reasons that the book is better as an introduction, rather than a core reference for applying lean principles to information systems. I do not see this book as being a requirement for lean production classes in the future; however, it is an interesting read for anyone looking to see the role IT plays in a company's lean transformation.

References

Cunningham, Jean, Jones, Duane. (2007). Easier, Simpler, Faster: Systems Strategy for Lean IT. Productivity Press.

Womack, James, Jones, Daniel (2003). Lean Thinking. Free Press.

Appendix A

The Thirteen Guiding Information System Principles (Cunningham and Jones 149):
1. Automate only if it is easier, faster, and complements your culture.
2. Build commonality to increase visibility and access to information.
3. The primary purpose of security is to avoid data corruption and provide information access.
4. Nothing lasts forever.
5. Systems and software inflexibility can be the greatest inhibitor of change.
6. Plain English-system instructions are better than shorthand.
7. Keystrokes matter to power users.
8. Capture everything you can about your customer.
9. Archive customer history; clean house on internal transactions.
10. Capture information once and be done.
11. Use commonality to create an information highway.
12. Productivity for all is more important than productivity for one.
13. Huge data stores are easy to manipulate.

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