Global Cultures and Lean Initiatives

This past Spring, Jeffrey P. Wincel and Thomas J. Kull published a book titled People, Process, and Culture: Lean Manufacturing in the Real World. A purchaser and reader of the book, Scott E. from the University of Kentucky, had some questions. He asked: "People, Process, and Culture: Lean Manufacturing in the Real World shows there are many interesting effects that a country's culture has on Lean. This is shown by testing the influence of each cultural dimension. Aren't all these dimensions, however, happening at once? If so, how can a manager use the results specified in the book and take into account all dimensions at once?" I directed these questions directly to the authors, and here is their reply: 

Thanks Scott, this is very true. The multiple dimensions of national culture we examine are operating simultaneously. So they all could be impacting how effective Lean practices are, all at the same time. Our method of testing does account for this. That is, we allow all nine dimensions of national culture (as described in the GLOBE international study HERE) to simultaneously try to predict if Lean practices will be effective in a country. Researchers sometimes call this "competing for variance." Our results try to mimic what's happening in the real world; each of these influences exists, but which ones really stand out as impacting Lean practice effectiveness? We find four. We should note that there are many more aspects of national culture not included in our study, and we hope researchers will build on what we did to explore those. 

Now, what does this mean for managers? At the end of our book, we list the various regions of the world and how they "score" on the four dimensions of national culture that we found impactful. It's a nice table, and it summarizes potential benefits and detriments of having a specific cultural bias. For instance, Latin America scores high on a dimension called "uncertainty avoidance," which is a dimension that increases Lean effectiveness. For managers working in Latin America or working with suppliers in Latin America, they can use this knowledge. High uncertainty avoidance means there's likely a cultural bias for responding to out-of-control signals, valuing structure improvement, and being attracted to routines: each beneficial to making Lean work. We think managers can go to this table and ask themselves, "Are my people generally sensitive to uncertainty?" If yes, then maybe showing them how Lean helps this can bring more effort into making Lean work. 

Our book has many other tables that make this research easy-to-use. So I hope readers can enjoy it, learn from it, and best of all make use of it! Thanks for asking! 

What do you think of Jeffrey and Thomas’ response? As Lean initiatives expand across the globe, what effect do you think local cultures will have on the implementation of Lean methodologies?

The Supply Chain Executive?

I recently came across this great article written by Michael Koploy over on the Software Advice site. Koploy argues that technology companies must appoint more persons with strong supply chain backgrounds at the C-level (top-level executive) to operate at utmost efficiency. He believes that a talent crisis is, unfortunately, holding back this field from gaining increased exposure among executives.

Koploy notes Apple Inc.'s recent appointment of Tim Cook as new CEO of the company is groundbreaking because "a supply chain-minded executive is a rare sight" and believes "organizations need to take Apple’s lead and include supply chain-minded executives at the leadership table: to help organize, implement and manage strategies to improve the business’ value chain."

One of the most important points made in this article is essentially a statement that I've heard during many supply-chain presentations at various Lean conferences: Supply-chain experts must now "transition from a traditionally execution-based role to a strategic one."

Koploy's list of attributes for the ideal supply-chain executive candidate are:

1. Experience managing large, global supply chains.
2. A track record for being able to adhere to lean and just-in-time fundamentals.
3. Experienced enough with SCM software to know how to implement and leverage its benefits.
4. The ability to continually push both strategic and operational supply chain improvements.

What are your thoughts on Koploy's assertions? Should more companies follow Apple's example? How should the industry respond to the skills' shortfall?

The Kanban Business is Thriving

With the risk of sounding like an advertisement for a particular company, I was happy to read this article detailing the 2009 successes of web-based kanban tool provider Ultriva. It appears that this slow economic environment hasn't hindered the company's growth. Essentially, I appreciated the implication of this article: even this tough economy has not distracted many manufacturers' with complex and intricate global supply chains from focusing on reducing the massive waste and improving efficiency.

Any company that expands it operations into culturally and technologically diverse regions introduce a whole range of new procurement, distribution, time, security, and scalability problems. In addition, one of the most common roadblocks I hear about is the integration of a kanban methodology into an existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) system because lean is action-oriented while ERP is data-driven. Have you addressed and overcome these problems? Has your company reconciled the use of lean principles and scheduling software?