Lean automated manufacturing: avoiding the pitfalls to embrace the opportunities

Hongyi Chen and Richard R. Lindeke

Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth, Minnesota, USA, and

David A. Wyrick
Department of Industrial Engineering, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, USA
Abstract Purpose Over the last several months, the cries to become lean and low cost have echoed all the way from the halls of government to the smallest companys back room. In times of severe economic challenge, the natural reaction is to make decisions that can make an organization become as lean and focused as possible. This paper aims to address these issues. Design/methodology/approach This paper discusses the benets and pitfalls associated with lean manufacturing management starting from the kernel idea that pleasing the customer should be at the root of all effort leading through the ravages of overzealous application of lean to the max. Elements of lean discussed in this paper address organizational waste, human resources, distributed design, supply chain management, customer management, and the nancial system. Findings Potential solutions and recommendations are made to help organizations become lean yet remain committed to being centered on the ultimate goal of customer satisfaction. These benets and pitfalls may be seen as outcomes based on the degree to which lean is implemented. Originality/value This paper reviews the popular lean manufacturing environment and makes practical recommendations to new adopters to avoid failures due to the improper application of lean to their organization. Keywords Lean production, Value chain, Management strategy Paper type General review

1. Introduction
The benets of lean enterprise management are welldocumented. More and more companies have embraced lean as the only way to manage their business. While the principles of waste reduction, human optimization, distributed design, and supply chain management has served many companies very well, these benets may alternatively lead to absolute failure. The authors previously documented the ravages of lean thinking taken to the limit and proposed the Temporal Think Tank (T3e) (Lindeke et al., 2008) as a solution. Lean management focuses on eliminating waste (non-valueadding activities) throughout their systems. This leads organizations to better understand their customers needs and deliver what the customer wants exactly when they want it (just-in-time). Lean has led to higher quality throughout the production chain and design through evolution. Major manufacturers concentrate their expertise and judiciously outsource vital sub-components and sub-assemblies to specialists who become critical to the supply of the nal product. By selective sharing of design/development, the lead (lean) organization can focus resources and competencies on a limited set of innovative ideas and reduce their direct costs for innovating many of the components in their products.
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What, however, happens in the event of a sea-change as described in Lindeke et al. (2008), or worse yet, the failure of a vital supplier? Only by addressing various scenarios can the high-level organization hope to succeed, or even survive. This may require additional personnel from the lean company to work more closely with supplier organizations as they struggle to make their sea change. By shifting employees throughout the workforce, and actually working within the other organizations operations, many companies have learned to survive and quickly adapt to change. This concept was, in part the spark for the T3e. Lean management is not simply cutting out the fat in an organization. Fundamentally, lean requires taking personal responsibility for ones work and pleasing ones customer, at whatever level that customer species. Without distributing the work force in the value chain, and attendant personication of the customer, all of the lean benets can be forfeited as a supplier worries more about the bottom line costs and delivery schedule rather than the receivers needs for quality product. This is particularly true in difcult economic times when the extra people in the suppliers or customers plants are brought home to address local issues brought on by reducing the work force to the leanest levels. This paper explores the positive and negative aspects of a lean philosophy. Providing this foundation exposes some pitfalls in lean thinking. The current downward shift in the marketplace poses important challenges to the lean paradigm.
This paper is an updated and revised version of an award winning paper previously presented at Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing Conference (FAIM), University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, UK, July 6-8, 2009.

Assembly Automation 30/2 (2010) 117 123 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited [ISSN 0144-5154] [DOI 10.1108/01445151011029745]

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Can companies apply lean in a shrinking economy, while focusing on innovations needed for survival? In particular, this paper suggests that organizations, to protect their value streams, begin the effective use of business system- and production-oriented T3es, develop more intelligent and exible manufacturing systems, redene values to encourage long-term, risk-taking innovation activities, and closely support suppliers along their entire value chain.

2. Benets and pitfalls of lean systems

While the benets of lean practices are well-documented, some of the negative effects of lean on employee outcomes, work characteristics, product design, and an organizations innovation capability have also been studied (Lindeke et al., 2008; Lewis, 2000; Parker, 2003; Fucini and Fucini, 1990; Mehri, 2006). To offer researchers and practitioners an extensive list of the potential pitfalls in the lean thinking, we present our analysis in this section. The analysis is based on a thorough literature review in the elds of lean manufacturing, new product development, technology and innovation management, and human resource management. Case studies are also employed in our research. Besides, those ones identied in literature (Lindeke et al., 2008; Lewis, 2000; Parker, 2003; Fucini and Fucini, 1990; Mehri, 2006), many more issues have come to our attention as we link the lean philosophy to other management concepts. In the following sections, we attempt to clearly spell out the key concepts of lean and discuss the associated pitfalls. 2.1 Reducing waste Waste reduction is the fundamental concept in the lean philosophy. By focusing on value-adding activities, lean enterprises actively work to identify and eliminate different kinds of waste, called muda in Japanese, from the system. Any activities that consume resources but do not create value will be considered muda, and become the subject of Kaizen (continuous improvement) events. Wastes can include designing wrong products that no customer wants, making mistakes in the manufacturing process that leads to defects, employees being left idle or waiting for deliveries during work hours, etc. The seven categories of waste summarized in Hale and Kubiak (2007) have a good cover of all the wastes in lean denition, and they are listed as: 1 overproducing more items than included in customer orders; 2 inventory due to increases of nished goods and work-inprocess; 3 motion that does not add value to the nal product; 4 waiting for any resource throughout the ow of design and production; 5 transportation or the additional movement that is not of value to the product; 6 over-processing or additional steps that do not increase the overall value of the product; and 7 not being right the rst time or the costs and time associated with repairing and correcting a product. Correct identication of muda and successful elimination of them leads to reduced manufacturing cost, higher product quality, improved customer satisfaction, and increased prots. However, in reducing waste and focusing on value-adding activities, a company may focus on obvious short-term benets and ignore long-term competitive advantages. Since the return 118

on investment for many innovations is very difcult to quantify when the ideas rst take shape, especially before the potential market has been clearly identied and developed, it is very likely that those ideas, especially the ones offering particularly longterm contributions, will be considered non-value-adding and thus be cut-off. Even before ideas get generated, the time and effort that are necessary to spark innovation may also be eliminated as waste in a lean system. It should be noted that when the lean concepts were rst developed in Toyota Company by Taiichi Ohno, time was set aside periodically for the worker teams to get together and suggest ways to improve the system (Womack et al., 2007). These creative times are highly valuable in keeping the teams, and hence the organization, innovative and to continuously improve the manufacturing process. However, as lean practices reach the extreme, the shrinking size of the workforce and the busy schedules of employees who have multiple responsibilities will make it much harder to get workers together for formal discussions, much less casual chats that may spark innovative changes. In addition, in order to identify non-value-adding activities, value should be clearly understood and dened. In lean thinking, it is emphasized that value can only be dened by the end-users (Womack and Jones, 2003). Customers needs and wants should be followed closely in product design and manufacturing. Any products or features that the current customers do not want will be considered muda since they do not generate revenues in the current market. This approach is expected to continuously and incrementally improve products and increase customer satisfaction, especially in a market pull situation. However, it may hinder radical innovations that create technology push opportunities and cause companies to stumble upon disruptive innovations. A disruptive technology is a new technology or new application that usually underperforms in area(s) most desired by the mainstream customers, at least in the short-term, but with other valuable features and great potential to develop, the technology can eventually better more established technologies and dominate the market. As noted in Christensen (2006), blindly following customers demand may lead a company to focus on technology development that overshoots customers demand and lose the market to disruptive technologies that had been initially denied by the same group of customers. Therefore, exclusively following customers denition of value and the elimination of all non-value adding activities can lead a lean company to failures because customers can be wrong, or at least short-sighted. 2.2 Human resource management The second keystone to the lean philosophy is to respect the workers since they are the knowledge resources in the system. As discussed above, slack in lean systems are continuously identied and removed as muda. Slack on the human resource side mean unused work time and excess workers. Increasing worker utilization and reducing the size of the workforce usually lead to reduced manufacturing costs. However, stress is also created in the work environment from crazy schedules and multiple responsibilities. In certain situations, stress may drive creative tensions that stimulate employees creativity (Oldham and Cummings, 1996). However, too much stress is more likely to stie employees creative thinking. As noted in Silverthorne (2002), most people cannot function effectively in a time crunch for long

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periods without burning out, even if they have a sense of being on an important mission and being challenged. Therefore, even though the jobs in a mature lean system are supposed to make employees feel important and challenged and thus greatly respected by the company, workers will not be able to innovate when they have been under too much stress for too long. Typically, when a company becomes leaner and leaner, a naturally expected result is layoffs. Unlike workers in Japan, where lean manufacturing originated, workers in the West do not have the luxury of a lifetime employment guarantee. As a result, lack of job security constitutes another source of employee stress in lean enterprises. For employees in Western lean companies, a conict exists between the fear of losing jobs and the need to accomplish more with less people while continuously eliminating excess workers. This probably explains, why critics renamed lean manufacturing mean manufacturing or management by stress (Parker, 2003). Just because of being lean, the company runs the risk of being fragile in situations when many workers call in sick or choose to go on strike. In either case, not enough people will be there to cover the jobs; work will be delayed dramatically and quality may suffer. With just enough people who are very much stressed and in many cases pushed to the limit, a lean system can hardly respond to such emergencies. Employees in a lean company are trained and expected to take on multiple responsibilities. Since everyone can perform every job to some degree, the exibility of the system is increased. During times when sales decrease, instead of waiting for orders beside the assembly line, primary engineers, and assemblers are expected to transform themselves into salespeople and go out to talk to potential customers to create sales. However, as a tradeoff, employees may lose special expertise as they change roles frequently. In traditional organizations, the career ladder is designed to allow employees to gain a depth of knowledge in one special area rst and then expand their expertise (Bennett, 1996). It is important to develop expertise in an area since it is essential to have expertise in order to innovate in such an area, and broad understanding of different areas will be a plus that sometimes stimulates innovations. In lean environments, if the job responsibilities are shared too broadly and shifted too often, the employees may never get a chance to deepen their understanding and keep up with the development of technologies in any area. This will eventually negatively affect the capability of an organization to innovate and can even lead to a regression in retained organizational knowledge. One of the cases that the authors considered when examining the potential pitfalls of a lean workforce is a university department that has been short of teaching resources for several years. To survive increasing student enrollment with a lean faculty group, many members have to take the responsibility of continuously teaching new courses, some of which are not in their direct or closely related areas of expertise. At the same time, the average teaching load and the service load have also been increased. Time to perform research and innovate, either with their classes or in departmental outlook has been largely taken instead by developing course materials and preparing for lectures. The innovation rate, measured by publications in this context, can only be seen to decrease. 2.3 Distributed design Distributed design characterizes, the product design and manufacturing strategies in lean companies. In fact, Japanese lean car producers design and provide detailed drawings of only 119

30 percent of the parts in their cars, the rest are distributed to its rst-tier suppliers, who usually have expertise in process engineering and plant operations (Womack et al., 2007). In this way, the responsibilities of manufacturing are mostly shifted to suppliers. The lean producers become focused on the overall design of product and the nal assembly of parts being engineered and produced by different suppliers. This approach agrees with the economic theory that distributing jobs to the most efcient parties increases overall social welfare. By focusing on product design and nal assembly while aggressively outsourcing parts, lean companies are able to steadily decrease the unit cost of products. However, since most major parts are outsourced as a turnkey project to suppliers, the lean producers are barely involved in manufacturing of many, and often key, components of their products. As a result, the companys own ability to design, debug, and improve manufacturing systems, or even large segments of their products will decrease. For a company that wants to achieve product leadership, it is critical to maintain and strengthen its manufacturing ability. This is linked to a third cornerstone of lean: being agile where this agility helps develop from the strength of design and manufacturing knowledge and facilitates bringing innovative products to market quickly. Designing high-quality products and low-cost manufacturing is an important part. When incremental changes to modules/parts no longer lead to overall product improvement, the relationships among the product components and core concepts may need to be recongured (Henderson and Clark, 1990). In such a situation, manufacturing processes for new designs will need to be created, assessed, and improved. The Toyota Company in Japan tries to maintain a long-term relationship with its suppliers and helps them improve manufacturing by loaning/ switching its engineers through the supplier companies. This approach promotes communication and knowledge sharing between producers and suppliers to a great degree. However, to solve the fundamental problem, a company will need a strong incentive and great commitment of time and efforts to understand and be involved in major suppliers manufacturing process. Another tradeoff to distributed design when parts are mostly outsourced is that the innovations from internal product research and development (R&D) at a company may ow out to competitors too quickly, even before the company can benet fully. Since most suppliers provide parts to multiple customers, to reduce cost, suppliers are likely to provide parts that are similar, if not the same, to each customer. Even if there are agreements in place to keep trade secrets, other customers of the same supplier may smell innovations from the parts or assemblies they receive or conversations with the suppliers representatives. 2.4 Supply chain management In the lean supply chain, parts from suppliers arrive shortly before they are needed since excess inventories were eliminated as waste. This approach saves storage space and costs, and improves efciencies. However, with no reserve stocks, the system will stop running if parts do not arrive on time or a faulty shipment comes. This happened in the early stage when General Motors (GM) tried to embrace the lean philosophy in its Pontiac assembly plant in Pontiac, Michigan. Since all the buffers and inventories had been removed, a failure of a shipment from its supplier, in this case the Flint

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plant nearby, caused the entire plant in Pontiac to shut down and they had to send the workforce home 4 h early with a loss in production of product that was slated to ow to the customer (Womack and Jones, 2003). Although this issue is supposed to be solved by the supporting organizational structures that are constructed, there is no guarantee that a late or faulty shipment will not happen in a mature lean system. Supply problems become more likely when nancial crises affect every component of the economy, as we nd today. Since large complex parts of the product are solesourced in lean-supply systems, the failure of a supplier, especially a rst-tier supplier, can be fatal to the company. Strikes at different levels of the supply chain will also have a signicant negative effect on production at the lean company. One need only consider, the problems at GM when a supplier of airbags went into bankruptcy and no longer provide products to them, or would even release GMs tooling to move it to a different supplier (Detroit News, 2008). The 1998 strikes in two of GMs part supplier factories in Flint, Michigan, that caused 26 out of 29 North American assembly plants to close down and lay off nearly half of GMs workforce (Bradsher, 1998) is another good example that without buffers, failure of any link on the lean supply chain will cause the whole chain to fall like dominos. One of the prime driving ideas that most companies adopt when they begin their conversion to lean management is to consolidate their vendor list. Since there is a cost associated with keeping communication channels open to vendors, even if they are not Tier 1 or even regular suppliers, most lean companies view extra vendors as muda. Reduction in vendors can save resources; however, it can also limit innovation. One of the authors spent time with a lean manufacturer recently and observed an unfortunate issue as the engineering staff explored a new quality process. The engineers had identied a promising new measuring device but they were unable to purchase it for testing because the vendor was not on the approved list! This led to a signicant delay and additional expense for bringing innovation into the company. Surely, this was an unexpected, but often observed, consequence of the effect of vendor and supply chain control in lean enterprises. 2.5 Customer management In the Japanese Toyota system, a large workforce is maintained to deal with customer management. Japanese buyers usually purchase a new car about every four years, due in large part to a governmental policy that requires very expensive and very demanding vehicle inspections as a car ages. In order to maximize the total income from a customer over the long-term, the sales department in Toyota devotes a signicant, and costly, effort to keep good long-term relationships with every customer (Womack et al., 2007). Keeping every customers information in a database and calling them frequently will instill customer loyalty and make it difcult for competitors to gain a share in the Japanese market. Compared with customers in Japan, people in other countries do not have to purchase new cars as often in the absence of strict government regulations dealing with the inspection of aging vehicles. Therefore, maintaining a lifetime relationship with customers seems much less important in those markets. A lean system would likely view a large workforce dedicated to customer management as a waste, thus, will train and expect the customer service personnel to perform other jobs. As mentioned in Womack et al. (2007), 120

during a visit to the Toyota Company, the authors were told that the external relationship manager was too busy to meet with them since he was doing some assembling. In the same way, the experts that used to analyze and communicate customers needs may be moved to other jobs and become too busy with more obvious or urgent work, including assembly. By this action in the long-term, knowledge and expertise needed to managing customer interaction will be lost. 2.6 Financial system While the shadow pricing strategy is used in both lean and mass production companies, lean companies tend to use it more aggressively. Figure 1 shows an example: both lean and mass production companies set the selling prices: at $20,000 and 30,000, respectively, lower than the actual initial manufacturing and development cost ($50,000), expecting the learning curve effect and economies of scale will drop the average unit cost if the sales reach the projected ve million units volume. Both companies decrease the product price one or a few times as their products enter into a later stage in the life cycle to beat competitors and better penetrate the market. The main difference is that the lean company tries to set the selling price lower than the price of the mass product company and much lower than its actual initial cost, hoping that by applying lean practices, the unit manufacturing cost will drop more quickly and dramatically as more customers are attracted to purchase the product. It is reasoned that prots gained later through expanded market share will soon compensate for the losses incurred in the beginning of a products life. Increasing sales to the point that early losses can be compensated for therefore quickly and continuously reducing costs by effective lean practices throughout the process are critical for the survival of a lean company. While the aggressive shadow pricing strategy encourages initial purchases and can succeed in an expanding market, applying it in a shrinking market, without being able to differentiate ones product through superior features and quality from its competitors will, likely, only expedite the fall of the company. Simply being cheap is not the answer to sustaining success: innovation and technological advancements are the ultimate driving forces of product leadership. 2.7 Summary of lean pitfalls Table I summarizes the lean concepts and the potential failures that they may lead to, as discussed in the previous sections. Figure 1 Shadow pricing strategy as employed by lean organizations
Manufacturing unit cost $50K

$30K $20K Selling Price 30K 50K Manufacturing volume Mass production Manufacturing cost Product price Lean production 1M 5M

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Table I Summary of lean pitfalls

Lean concepts in Eliminate all wastes Pitfalls Companies may: Eliminate the creative times that are necessary to innovations Focus on short-term value-adding activities and lose long-term competitive capability through radical innovations Miss technology-push opportunities Stumble over disruptive innovations Create more stresses in the work environment and make employees lose the feeling of job security Employees may lose expertise in their special areas Companies may lose the ability to design, debug, and improve the manufacturing system of the parts Parts designed and manufactured in different places may not match Opportunities to develop radical and architectural innovations will be eliminated Internal innovations may ow out too fast before the company can benet from its R&D Late and faulty shipment of parts will stop the system The failure of a rst-tier suppliers are fatal Effects of strikes on different levels of the supply chain will be amplied Customer satisfaction may be lost in the long-term as a result of the busy schedules and multiple responsibilities of customer analyst The use of shadow pricing strategy may lead to total failure in a shrinking economy Cross-ownership and interlocking equity with each other in the lean group may expedite the fall of the whole group in a crisis

Multiple job responsibilities Distributed design

Lean supply chain

Customer management Financial management

3. Solutions to maximize the benets of lean

For a company to maximize the benets of its lean practices, special attention must be paid to the pitfalls discussed above. While it is not the purpose of this paper to offer an exclusive list of solutions, a few are suggested. When one reviews a company that has a strong survival instinct, often we nd that they have embraced the ability to be agile and exible in their product design and manufacturing environment. This agility is linked to their innovative spirit and is vested into the establishment of independent organizations, like those espoused by the authors in the T3e (Lindeke et al., 2008). When economic conditions become difcult, as in the current worldwide economic crisis, it is the companies who have agile philosophies that can succeed. Thus, at least as it views the future, an organization must drop strict adherence to the Lean mantra of its muda to carve out its future by nding time to reect and study for products that will allow it to ourish in the recovery period that is ahead. Creating an independent organization, like T3e (Lindeke et al., 2008), with a cost structure not honed to achieve high-prot margin in the current market is also a solution for companies to harness disruptive innovations without affecting the lean nature of the parent company. To cultivate an innovation-encouraging culture in a lean company, it is important to dene value in the way that innovation-driving activities are viewed so as not to be considered muda. Setting aside some creative times not only helps reduce job anxiety and get employees re-energized, but also provides opportunities for the employees to interact and stimulate out-of-the-box thinking. Dening value effectively also calls for a positive attitude toward risk taking. As emphasized in an interview by Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric (GE), it is important for an organization to make it ok to take risks and devote time and efforts to certain activities that do not produce results in a short-term (Business Week, 2005). An R&D portfolio that builds both short- and long-term competitiveness will better prepare a lean company 121

to stand out in erce competition. As an essential part of the lean system, workers should be respected and involved as much as possible in the decision-making process. In this way, a sense of importance, enjoyment, and satisfaction will be provided to motivate employees creativities. Given the advantage of being exible, a lean company should be able to respond to changes more effectively if contingency plans are developed ahead of their absolute need. Therefore, besides ensuring competitiveness through continuous innovations, the company also wants to closely monitor and forecast the market demand and technology trends, assess its own competitive advantages, conduct sensitivity analysis, and generate scenario analyses. A variety of decision analysis tools are available to facilitate such activities and sharpen decision-makers judgment (Chen et al., 2009; Gerdsri and Kocaoglu, 2007; Millett and Honton, 1991; Yoon and Park, 2007). What the companies need to do is to select and adopt suitable ones to maximize their benets. In addition, to better cope with uncertainties and disruptions in the dynamic market environment, more intelligent and exible manufacturing systems are needed, especially for the companies in which tooling and equipment require large capital investment. Flexible product platforms can be designed to effectively share common components and deliberately project uncertainties into exible elements that are carryover-modied in different product families or product generations. In this way, the need of redesign as well as changes in manufacturing tooling and equipment will be minimized in an event of new product introduction. Details about the systematic process of exible product platform design can be found in Suh et al. (2007). Owing to the strong dependencies of a lean company on its suppliers, it is critical for the lean company to support those suppliers. This calls for more transparent nancial systems and cash ows along the chain, since the system is only as strong as the weakest component of the whole chain. In the unfortunate incident stated above, with the failure of a key supplier, one can only wonder if cost control tactics by GM

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were not ultimately to blame in the failure. Surely, squeezing a few more cents out of the cost of the product each year for the last few years, as its market share shrank, did little to improve the sales picture for GM but could have sealed the collapse of this supplier. With better foresight this cash strapped supplier, who was likely unable to support innovation, could have been saved and could have begun to deliver even better products to GM in the future. GM could have provided assistance, perhaps by increasing its prices by a few dollars per vehicle and passing the added revenue directly back to its struggling supply chain with a very small impact of its number of sales over the short-term. This would be clearly seen as a shadow pricing initiative that would have reaped huge benet into the future. Any organization, regardless of where it lies along the road to lean, can open itself to clearly explain its nancial condition to its partners. It can share difculties and build long-term trust, strength, and a healthful and supportive relationship, as suggested by the Japanese Lean Manufacturers, rather than creating legal adversaries as has happened here. Closely working with the suppliers also helps the lean company to keep up with the most recent developments in manufacturing technologies. This may require additional personnel from the lean company to work in supplier companies; however, it is critical for the company to maintain its ability in designing and debugging the manufacturing system, and to optimize the whole value chain. By shifting employees throughout the workforce, and actually working within the other organizations operations, many companies have learned to survive. This concept was, in part the spark for the T3e introduced by the authors in an earlier paper (Lindeke et al., 2008). The fundamental and controlling underpinnings of lean management are based on taking personal responsibility for ones work and pleasing ones customer, at whatever level that customer has specied. Without having a work force that is distributed along the value chain, and this attendant personication of the customer, all of the benets of lean can end at the shipping dock with a supplier worrying about the bottom line costs and delivery schedule rather than the receivers needs for quality product. Therefore, in difcult economic times when the companys initial reaction would be to bring the extra people in the suppliers or customers plants back home to address local needs as the work force is whittled down to the leanest levels, this is often the worst means to address the problems posed by hard economic times.

pitfalls of overzealous lean to become a stronger competitor for having survived the on going, or in fact any, nancial crisis.

References
Bennett, F.L. (1996), The Management of Engineering: Human, Quality, Organizational, Legal, and Ethical Aspects of Professional Practice, Wiley, New York, NY. Bradsher, K. (1998), GM strike spreads to communities far from Flint factories, The New York Times, August 3. Business Week (2005), Bringing innovation to the home of Six Sigma, Business Week, August 1, available at: www. businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_31/b3945409.htm (accessed January 31, 2008). Chen, H., Ho, J.C. and Kocaoglu, D.F. (2009), A strategic technology planning framework: a case of Taiwans semiconductor foundry industry, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Vol. 56 No. 1, pp. 4-15. Christensen, C.M. (2006), The Innovators Dilemma, HarperCollins, New York, NY. Detroit News (2008), General Motors sues bankrupt auto parts supplier, Detroit News, December 27, available at: www.detnews.com Fucini, J. and Fucini, S. (1990), Working for the Japanese: Inside Mazdas American Auto Plant, The Free Press, New York, NY. Gerdsri, N. and Kocaoglu, D.F. (2007), Applying the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to build a strategic framework for technology roadmapping, Mathematical and Computer Modelling, Vol. 46, pp. 1071-80. Hale, R. and Kubiak, D. (2007), Wastes nal foothold, Industrial Engineer, Vol. 39 No. 8, pp. 36-8. Henderson, R.M. and Clark, K.B. (1990), Architectural innovation: the reconguration of existing product technologies and the failure of established rms, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 35, pp. 9-30. Lewis, M.A. (2000), Lean production and sustainable competitive advantage, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol. 20 No. 8, pp. 959-78. Lindeke, R.R., Wyrick, D.W. and Chen, H. (2008), Effecting change and innovation in a highly automated and lean organization: the Temporal Think Tanke (T3e), Proceedings of the Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing FAIM 2008, Skovde, Sweden. Mehri, D. (2006), The darker side of lean: an insiders perspective on the realities of the Toyota Production System, Academy of Management Perspectives, Vol. 20 No. 2, pp. 21-42. Millett, S.M. and Honton, E.J. (1991), A Managers Guide to Technology Forecasting and Strategic Analysis Methods, Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus, OH. Oldham, G.R. and Cummings, A. (1996), Employee creativity: personal and contextual factors at work, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 39 No. 3, pp. 607-34. Parker, S.K. (2003), Longitudinal effects of lean production on employee outcomes and the mediating role of work characteristics, Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 88 No. 4, pp. 620-34. Silverthorne, S. (2002), Time Pressure and Creativity: Why Time is Not on Your Side, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge for Business Leaders, Boston, MA, available at: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/cgi-bin/print (accessed January 31 2008). 122

4. Conclusion
Lean enterprise management aims to eliminate waste, effectively manage personnel, distribute design among entities that are best at each stage, work with the supply chain, manage customers, and wisely manage the organizations nances. In each activity, the focus is to eliminate muda, or waste. For each of these elements of lean, examples have been provided in this paper to warn against the zealous overapplication of lean. Taken beyond a moderate, reasonable level, lean will actually decrease the organizations ability to compete. In times of great economic stress, implementing lean management as much as possible is an understandable reaction, but it may ultimately insure the failure of the organization rather than save it. The authors have offered advice to the newly lean organization to avoid many of the

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Suh, E.S., de Weck, O.L. and Chang, D. (2007), Flexible product platforms: framework and case study, Research Engineering Design, Vol. 18, pp. 67-89. Womack, J.P. and Jones, D.T. (2003), Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, The Free Press, New York, NY. Womack, J.P., Jones, D.T. and Roos, D. (2007), The Machine that Changed the World, The Free Press, New York, NY. Yoon, B. and Park, Y. (2007), Development of new technology forecasting algorithm: hybrid approach for

morphology analysis and conjoint analysis of patent information, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Vol. 54 No. 3, pp. 588-99.

Corresponding author
Richard R. Lindeke can be contacted at: rlindek1@d.umn. edu

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