Lean production is a manufacturing methodology originally developed by Toyota in the 1950s for the manufacturing of automobiles. Engineer Taiichi Ohno is credited with developing the Toyota Production System and, ultimately, lean production. Ohno discovered that by enhancing quality, production automatically improved and the waste of materials and resources was reduced, hence creating a lean enterprise.
Today, many global automotive companies have adopted “lean” principles in order to compete with Toyota and other Japanese automobile manufacturers. The term lean in business or manufacturing describes a philosophy that incorporates a collection of tools and techniques into the business processes to optimize time, human resources, assets and productivity, while improving the quality level of products and services to their customers. Lean production is all about managing and improving a workshop or business process so that you can deliver what the customer needs—profitably.
In their book The Machine That Changed the World, James Womack and Daniel Jones, two of the top industrial analysts in the world, explained how companies can dramatically improve their performance through lean production. The system’s principles work anywhere and in any type of business—inclu- ding collision repair shops —because they are universal.
One major building block of the Toyota Production System is the continuous improvement process (called kaizen). It is through implementation and integration of continuous improvement processes that your collision repair business is able to benefit by reducing costs, improving quality and increasing productivity. It is important for you to realize, upfront, that making your operational processes lean is a major learning experience and requires a total commitment from management and staff.
How can these lean production principles yield extraordinary benefits to the collision repair industry? Can we really improve our quality, raise the production flow and drive down our operating costs as a result of implementing lean principles?
The reason for broad acceptance of this process is that the principles are well thought out, proven and can yield dramatic results. The main principles are: teamwork, communication, efficient use of resources and elimination of waste and continuous improvement. All of these are key business drivers that can help any business become more efficient and effective at what they do, whether it is a service provider or a manufacturer.
The first step in applying this revolutionary approach to your shop business is learning to identify waste. If you become extremely aware of waste, you immediately will be able to recognize it and eliminate its root cause. The collision repair industry provides us with many opportunities to eliminate waste. A few of the most common examples are waste in inventory, waste in time and material, waste in extra steps/procedures and waste in excessive facility capacity and equipment. In order to begin to eliminate waste, it will be necessary to empower your technicians to systematically trace every error or mistake back to its root cause and then to devise a solution so that it never occurs again. This does not imply that you should punish your staff for waste, but, conversely, you must challenge them to identify waste when they see or experience it. You will need to enlist their help in driving out waste in all its forms. Therefore, it is absolutely essential to get their open and honest feedback, which requires a fear-free environment.
Consider this. What amount of time and money are spent when inspecting a vehicle’s repair quality at the end-of-the-line? How much does it cost to rectify problems and defects at this point? In many situations, the customer has taken on the role of the quality control inspector in order to ensure that their expectations have been met. This scenario creates a dissatisfied customer, and it always costs the collision repair shop more than the direct costs of correcting the quality related issues. Indirect costs stemming from this practice are enormous and often overlooked (e.g., lost opportunities, insurance company relationships, employee moral and the company’s image in the marketplace).
Quality has to be built into the product during the entire repair process—quality cannot be inspected into the finished product. If quality inspectors are evaluating vehicles that are completely done, it’s too late and too costly to make the right quality adjustments at that stage. To achieve the goal of lean production, you must eliminate all of the production process defects and errors, and then, and only then, will you have a higher quality product, which actually costs your organization less money to produce. The final result of lean operations is a higher quality product (adding nothing but value), produced faster and at a lower cost than your competitors.
After reading the book The Machine That Changed the World, I went to work on designing and developing a flow-chart model to illustrate the lean production process as it applies to the collision-repair environment. Although this was five years ago, it still seems like yesterday to me. I recall how excited I was to share it with someone in the collision repair industry. I sought out a good friend who owns a collision repair shop, and anticipated an ecstatic response when I opened my briefcase and popped out my laminated “Lean Production” flow chart. He studied it for a few minutes with this morose look on his face, and I began badgering him to tell me what he thought, expecting nothing but the highest praise and accolades. He finally looked right into my eyes and said, “This will never work, and it just won’t work in a body shop environment.” Several years have gone by since then, and as things certainly do change—I will tell you, that same person has become a major proponent of lean. He has been at work for the last three years building a lean culture and work environment at his shop, which has already proven to deliver the phenomenal results that we had discussed some five years earlier.
The message is clear—get lean, or get left behind.
