Most Manufacturers Implement Lean Too Early. And It Costs Them.
- Mac Davis
- Jun 9
- 2 min read
Most manufacturers implement Lean too early. And it costs them.
If you need to improve now, do not implement Lean.
When a plant is under pressure to improve, the instinct is to reach for Lean. Kaizen events. Value stream mapping. 5S blitzes. It looks like action. It feels like progress.
But plants that are under pressure to improve have something in common: they always have known problems they aren't solving.
And if you have problems you aren't successfully solving, the problem probably isn't process design. Most problems are preventable pretty simply.
It's more likely that you have a process compliance issue.
If that's true, Lean isn't going to help you. It's going to make your situation worse.
If you attempt to implement Lean with a compliance issue unresolved, you'll overextend an already unstable operation.
You'll add a substantial quantity of workload to a leadership team that's already probably overworking just to handle firefighting.
And you'll generate expense, burnout, frustration, and pain.
The real question is: why aren't you solving the problems you already know about?
The answer is because you don't have that much control of the organization. When there are processes but they're widely disregarded, that's the condition of "complacency".
And you cannot fire/punish/write-up, or flog an organization out of complacency.
Complacency isn't laziness. It's persistent in-adherence to one's own processes and standards.
In a complacent environment, process work is wasted because people either don't know what the standard is or they don't believe it matters enough to follow.
Fix that first. I recommend calling 180 OPEX and instituting our Integrated Training and Accountability System.
When you solve the complacency problem, something shifts: you start actually closing out the issues on your list. The daily reports start clearing.
One by one, the problems go away. Once you beat complacency and you start executing to standard... even errors that seem unrelated will often stop too.
Watch those daily reports carefully. If there are problems on them every day, then you have repetitive problems which haven't been solved. That is implied by the Pareto rule.
If your system hasn't changed meaningfully, then they're going to persist.
If your reports aren't actively clearing, that's a sign you aren't solving problems effectively and Lean will only compound the instability.
But when the reports do clear? When you've genuinely run out of known problems?
That's when you implement Lean.
You'll also notice something else by then: the firefighting is gone. The reactive labor that consumed your leaders' bandwidth simply isn't there anymore.
And your leaders have free time.
That capacity is yours to deploy as you see fit.
But you have to defeat complacency before you do Lean.
The sequence matters.
Before you launch another improvement initiative, ask a simpler question:
Are your existing standards being followed consistently?
Most organizations don't need more process design. They need a system that reinforces the standards they already have.
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