Conversations with Manufacturing Engineers: Drawing Similarities Between Industry 4.0 and Lean Manufacturing

Until recent years, lean manufacturing has been the prevailing philosophy of success in operations management.

Originating in Japan as a result of post-war American intervention in Japanese manufacturing, Lean manufacturing stresses waste reduction, Just-In-Time delivery, and jidoka – the often forgotten practice of stopping the production line to fix problems.

Along with the core philosophy of lean, as it was brilliantly laid out by Jeffery Liker in The Toyota Way, are a selection of practical tools and techniques that can be deployed to achieve kaizen continuous improvement goals. These complimentary tools and techniques, pioneered by the Lean manufacturing gurus, include Value Stream Mapping, 5S Checklists and Visual Management Boards.

This is where it is important to make a distinction between true lean manufacturing, and adoption of lean tools. The gurus will explain that there is no organisation in the world that is truly lean (and has therefore completed it’s kaizen journey). Rather, the lean philosophy represents a process of relentless devotion to reducing waste, listening to employee feedback, and continuously improving.

In my experience, this point is often missed.

As an example, part of my professional experience includes working as a manufacturing engineer in a heavy engineering industry. Our factory had bought into the lean methodologies before I had arrived, and evidence of Lean was everywhere. They had Lean Lanes designating safe and unsafe areas, 5S posters reminding employees to Sort, Set, Shine, Standardize and Sustain, and a walk through of the Gemba would suggest a single-piece-flow production line was being used.

However, peering back the veil, it immediately became clear that adoption of lean was only skin deep. Firstly, There was no jidoka system in place, and so defects were not immediately identified and fixed. Secondly, there was no heijunka scheduling and so production rates were irregular. And finally, all the inventory had just been pushed out the door to sit in a warehouse down the street.

This is a classic case of unsuccessful lean implementation, but where does the lack of lean success come from?

The reasons were explained to me by a Frank Bonar, a manufacturing expert from BMW Germany at last year’s Smart Factory Expo, who explained that Lean manufacturing requires complete buy-in at all levels of the company. We can therefore speculate that the lack of a jidoka system, and other key pillars of lean, is likely because the leaders put too much importance on counter-productive KPIs such as Machine Utilisation Rate, which they use to indicate production functionality. Because of this lack of understanding and buy-in from leadership, Frank explained that the lean journey can never truly take off.

Frank is a firm believer that production cannot be stable without adoption of lean, especially key strategies of value stream mapping, kaizen and jidoka. Furthermore, if a production line is not stable then it should not automate! He explains that unless you really understand your production line, with each step understood in detail, then you should not automate any step of it.

“What will you do the day the robot breaks down?” He asks, proposing that without a stable production line underpinning automation, you are like the man who builds his house on the sand.

Frank portrays the lean production line as being like a foundational bedrock for manufacturing that can be used as a safety net when needed upon the failings of automation. Too often he has seen a corporate rush to automate in order to decrease cycle times, without a real understanding of how their processes work. This results in unsolved bottlenecks, build-ups of inventory, and occasional complete manufacturing failures as production grinds to a halt when the vital automation machine breaks down.

So is Frank against Industry 4.0 deployment for all but the few companies who have mastered lean?

No, definitely not. And here we can see a possible answer to the question of “what is the difference between Industry 4.0 and automation?”

Frank argues that Industry 4.0 is a holistic selection of tools and techniques, and true adoption of I4.0 represents a company-wide philosophical commitment to improvement, drawing similarities between I4.0 and Lean.

He explains that Automation is to I4.0 as JIT is to Lean. While automation is a great tool for reducing cycle times and increasing throughput, it must be supported by a suite of satellite solutions to enable true business improvement through automation. To this end, Industry 4.0 can offer solutions. Digital solutions which can augment kanban, jidoka and heijunka measures are the future of operational improvements. However, and Frank really stressed this point, if the business does not adopt the desire for continuous improvement at all levels of the firm, then I4.0 solutions will not deliver their full benefit.

So, according to Frank, Industry 4.0 can deliver a sort of digitised Lean-type stability to the production line, but you can’t “buy stability” and so serious work must go into understanding the production line thoroughly before sustainable improvements can be made. Furthermore, Frank warns against “running before you can walk”, stressing the need for buy-in at all levels of the company and a strong buisness case for expensive technological solutions.