Watching people trying to wrap their heads around the idea of Lean as more than a set of tools copied piecemeal from Toyota, I have noticed a two-stage problem.
First, people don’t understand what a system is, so they can’t, as Edwards Deming implored, “Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service…”
Second, they don’t understand how a Lean system differs from a mass production system.
These aren’t really all that difficult to understand, and they are really important, so let’s take a look at them.
First, what is a system? As I have written before, a system is a set of components that interact to produce a particular outcome. We can diagram this pretty easily:
The essence of a system: components and the interactions between those components.