The nature of Fat Maintenance
There are important questions that could help big organization attack their tendency to get fat. Why is it that people, institutions, and especially big institutions, always seem to go toward fat (with few exceptions) as they age? Is there any relationship between human middle age and organization middle age? Is this preordained? Is this entropy (the tendency for systems to go toward disorder)? These are particularly important philosophical questions. If there is any way around this stage it would be important to know.
Another useful inquiry: is the goal of Lean Maintenance to be totally lean or is a little fat ok. Is a basketball court or gym in the plant against Lean? If a company has the resources, can it put in day care for the employees’ kids or build an outdoor picnic area? Can some fat be good?
The issue is how we define fat. It is perfectly OK to have a gym because it does not impact the leanness of the basic operation (except using a few hundred square feet). In our definition, giving a little back to the employees for their health or enjoyment is not fat at all. It is by removing the fat that resources are made available for return to the employees and shareholders. Of course, the Lean fundamentalists disagree, saying that any square footage not dedicated to making product is fat. So a garden with picnic tables, or a daycare center, is fat for them but not for me.
So, what is fatness? At a survival level, fat is stored resources. Fat is stock stored against a famine. At emotional levels fat is satisfaction of phantom hunger. At a sensory level, fat is enjoyment of the fine things in life at levels and in amounts well above sustenance levels. The fat in organizations is all this and the inflexibility, lack of insight and feeling of struggle to get things done that goes with it.
Many great companies that were known in the last few generations as Lean have become bloated. In companies, fatness may come about when, for that time and place, survival and competition have been handled. However, survival and competition are never completely handled. but they can be handled for a time and in a place. The practices and attitudes that developed during the growth phase still continue to work reasonably well in the fat phase. Once the outside facts change enough (the marketplace, the technology), the company can fail, or be forced to reinvent itself to survive.
The best company example of this life cycle is IBM, once the pre-eminent computer manufacturer in the world with a market share over 70%. There was the ‘IBM way,’ which worked well for decades and set the stage for today’s computer culture. Then the computer world changed.
Companies introduced small personal computers. In fact, IBM was an accelerator of the change with the introduction of their IBM PC. That introduction itself was a break from the past because it used standardized instead of (its usual) proprietary parts. The short version of the story was that IBM’s fortunes fell dramatically and the company encountered hard times (for IBM). The company looked fat and without the ability to reach to the marketplace.
Just before the Internet boom, IBM had successfully reinvented itself as global integrators, consultants, and middleware suppliers (software that sits between the operating system and the user applications). The company is now re-invigorated and it looks entirely different from how it did in 1980.It is now a faster, leaner, and extremely effective force in the computer field for large businesses.
We associate fat with laziness. Fat organizations tend to be bureaucratic and inflexible. IBM filled this definition to a ‘T’ before its re-invention. In these organizations it is hard to get stuff done. The focus is more internal (rules, procedures, power) than external (toward customers and market needs). Lean organizations tend to be in action, and have less baggage to carry around, so getting things done is the expression of the company.
Consider the stories of John D Rockefeller and Standard Oil. In the early days, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was known as a Lean producer. Its rapid growth was not all due to his abuses of size and power that caused the government to break up the company. Initially he paid enormous attention to the cost and consequence of every decision. In one story he counted the number of drops of solder it took to seal a barrel. He realized he could get by with fewer drops. Now that is Lean!
Once Rockefeller became powerful and began to use his power to force his competition out of business, history has said, his behavior was unacceptable. He broke the law. “In 1911, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court judgment, and forced Standard Oil to separate into thirty-four companies” (Wikipedia). These companies became the leading oil companies in the world including Exxon-Mobile, Conoco-Phillips, Amoco and Sohio (now part of BP) and others.
The important conclusion is how the successors are oriented toward efficiency and Lean. In fact, none of the 34 companies would be known now as a Lean producer. So from the Lean roots and John D. Rockefeller we have inherited some very fat companies. Their Lean roots aren’t even part of their advertising or identity.
No such thing as Lean
Almost every organization that watched its pennies while they were growing now has trouble in watching its millions. Part of the issue is that there is no such thing as a Lean company. What does this mean? There is no magical place called Lean where you can arrive. There is only a Lean company here and now. More properly, companies move toward or away from Lean operations every day.
There is no permanence, just process and direction. Any company that considers itself lean (just like any company that thinks it is world class), is engaged in self deception. In a moment the leaders in the industry will fall and the followers will lead (or people who just entered the industry and didn’t exist a few years ago will lead everyone). Complacency is the enemy of a truly Lean enterprise. Simple changes in technology tomorrow can open avenues not contemplated by any expert today.
There are hundreds of examples of Fat maintenance. For example, organizations can have too much PM. We remember the words of John Wanamaker (a Philadelphia, PA department store founder in the early 20th century) when he said that he knew that half his advertising was wasted. He said his problem was that he didn’t know which half.
Half of a good PM effort is wasted. Nine tenths of a bad effort is wasted. One thing to consider is, what if you have a machine with a low consequence of failure? Let’s also say the PM cost exceeds the cost of the avoided failure. Is it Fat to PM it, and is it Lean to let it run to failure? For some people, choosing a breakdown strategy would be a scary thought (though it might be the Leanest choice).
Lean is both a continuous and a discontinuous process in that you can develop and improve your leanness by doing training and projects. Lean is discontinuous because as lean as your racks of relays are, they might be the height of fat in comparison to the solid-state world.
There’s a series of steps that make any service or product. Each step adds a little value to the product. This sequence is called the value stream, and it is comprised of all the steps from the identification of the need to the satisfaction of the need. In maintenance, the stream includes the work request or notification, the work order, job planning, coordination, scheduling, execution, and communications. All the subsidiary streams, such as material management, are value streams that flow into the main stream.
Within the value stream there’s a flow from step to step. Our goal is to provide maintenance services without waste or waiting. We want to eliminate both wasted execution and waiting time, and all excess materials. The waiting includes time expended by both the customer and the tradesperson. Let the customer pull value from the provider; customers say when they want the product and what product they want. In the maintenance world, customers define the uptime needed and the quality requirement. Then they schedule windows where maintenance can be provided.
Ideally, lean manufacturing seeks perfection in providing the product
