At least once a year, a video circulates on the internet featuring a 1980s work crew where only one person is shoveling while the others are happily supporting him. This is often seen as a typical example of socialism and the unemployment within factory gates. We joke about it, accept it as a stereotype, and in the meantime, we might not necessarily think about the fact that there were real professionals, good initiatives, products, hard-working people, too, and that low efficiency wasn’t entirely obvious.
Considering that I was just graduating from kindergarten in 1989, my only memory is how much overtime my dad did. But later, when I started working, I met the lean philosophy in an unusual setup, well before lean became widespread in Hungary.
As a fresh graduate, I worked in logistics at a small assembly company. The plant was managed by an old colleague, who had been a leader at a large, well-known socialist automotive factory next door for over 40 years before he retired and took on this job as a favor and to avoid boredom. He was much older than us and not particularly talkative. All we saw was that he walked silently around the plant all day, from one end of the assembly line to the other, stopping at each workstation, observing for a long time. All we saw was walking, standing, watching, thinking, walking, standing, watching, thinking. And we knew the workers didn’t like him because he was strict. He wasn’t popular, and there was a general lack of understanding about why he was even there.
Then one day, for some reason, he spoke about production, and I finally understood. He stood and watched, observing, measuring which operation took too long, whether the tool was suitable for the task, how much the worker had to walk to gather everything needed for their work, where the desk arrangement hindered the work, or where the workflow elements interfered with each other. He observed, mentally analyzing spaghetti diagrams and statistics, and decided on small changes. The result was that within a year, instead of assembling around 80 units, they were producing 125-130 units daily. This was a 55-60% performance improvement, which absolutely deserved recognition. It was no longer a question why his presence was necessary.
Later, when I was involved in production and learned about lean, it also struck me how interestingly anachronistic his actions were. He simultaneously brought in the experience, leadership style, and atmosphere of the previous economic system, while also being ahead of his time concerning lean. He was instinctively practicing lean long before the lean philosophy was widely known in Hungary, and it would take another good ten years for its widespread adoption.
This experience taught me two important lessons: first, efficiency can be improved anywhere, anytime, without any particular pre-training, using common sense. Second, it’s worthwhile to learn the theoretical background, principles, and tools, to read case studies, and exchange experiences because it makes our job much easier if we don’t have to invent everything from scratch but can use tried and tested methods for analysis. Not everyone has this instinctively, but it’s absolutely learnable—both the toolkit and the mindset.
by