Houses Built On Sand:
How the Lack of Operations
Management Knowledge Undermines
Lean Implementations

Kate Mackle, John Bicheno, John Darlington

Background: The MS in Lean Enterprise
• Started at Lean Enterprise Research Centre (LERC),
Cardiff Business School in 1999
• (LERC was founded by Dan Jones of Womack and Jones)
• 2 Year part-time, for practicing Lean managers
• Student average age 39 (31 to 53); 20% with MBA; 35%
Six Sigma Black Belt; almost 200 Alumni
• In First year, 9 one-week modules, 6 of which are held onsite at plant locations; Second year dissertation.
• Thus far, 65 one-week MS modules have been held on site.
• Most of the lecturers are are vastly experienced Lean consultants and managers
• As from January 2013, the MS will be offered at University of Buckingham with the original LERC teaching team.

Background to the presentation
• The authors have been working in improvement for 25 years and have taught on a Masters level programme in Lean Operations for the last 13 years. We have often been struck by the weakness in demand and capacity management processes in companies we have worked with: diagnosing and then rectifying this weakness has frequently been an important early stage of those companies’ successful Lean transformations.
• Similarly, students on the Masters programme, despite their current positions and prior education, have often
– Lacked fundamental knowledge of Operations Management
(especially Demand and Capacity)
– Or worse, have been „mis-educated‟ in Operations.

The history of “Lean development”
• In this paper, we briefly chart the history of Lean development to identify how these circumstances developed. How did we get from Ohno’s description of TPS as “profit-making industrial engineering” to today’s environment where the basic knowledge of
Capacity, Demand, and Queues is not