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 Fat Manufacturing is a parody on Lean Manufacturing and describes poor business practice in the form of theory. www.fatmanufacturing.com presents "fat methodology" as a number of tools and techniques designed to ensure a business performs as badly as possible, from a financial point of view and from a customer point of view. Companies who operate in a "fat" way are rarely problem solving, planning ahead, learning or improving. They are instead focused on the day to day issues and only concerned about end of month business performance on paper. Strategy, goal setting and team working is replaced by continuous firefighting, corner cutting, finger pointing and improvisation in order to find any way whatsoever of meeting flawed business targets set by upper management who follow out of date cost accounting principles and view all resources only in terms of their costs. Any delivery lead time plan is disregarded immediately as being unrealistic and unworkable and is therefore ignored from the outset, often because the plan has not been put together with sufficient process knowledge, thus is unrealistic and unworkable. The prophecy becomes a self-fulfilling one. As a result, Fat Manufacturing management focus is taken away from the customer who tends to receive deliveries much later than quoted, often with quality problems.
Fat Manufacturing methodology continues to be popular amongst many businesses in the mainly western world.
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 5S was conceived by a guy called Hiroyuki Hirano and was adopted by Toyota after World War II to form the bedrock for stability of the Toyota Production System (TPS), later becoming known as Just-In-Time (JIT) and then Lean Manufacturing.
So what is it? 5S is a systematic process for any growing organisation to reduce waste in the system leading to improved quality, speed, delivery and reduced cost. It is not simply a tidying-up exercise and this misconception is why so many organisations fail in its implementation and ultimately in building a lean entreprise. 5S is much bigger than this. It concerns standardisation and stability.
I've written an article explaining in detail the 5S stages, why it is important for any organisation and what is needed for it to succeed.
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 Anyone running or working in a medium to large organisation may well have heard of Lean Manufacturing. This term, describing what has become an operating philosophy for many companies around the world, originated at Toyota after the Second World War (Toyota Production System). Lean is a continuous and relentless focus on identifying and eliminating waste (= non added value activity) in order to reduce process variation, improve quality, increase flexibility, increase flow and inventory turns and reduce lead times. Ultimately, Lean is about cost reduction and improved financial performance through empowering people and continuous improvement.
I have worked in several companies that seem to operate very differently to a lean organisation, despite their slogans and mission statements suggesting a passion for serving the customer right-first-time quality products in the safest, quickest and most reliable manner.
I've invented the term "Fat Manufacturing", which is a parody of business slogans, buzzwords and company policies that describe the reality of some of the frustrating work environments I've had the pleasure of spending my time in. I must admit that not any single company is guilty of all of them.
Here's the link to the article. Anything here familiar to anyone?
There are, in fact, not that many "lean" companies around. Instead there are many that are coming to terms with the fact that adopting the principles of Lean Manufacturing is the only way forward to surviving in the long term. More and more companies in the services sector are taking on lean practitioners as Lean is no longer limited to manufacturing organisations.
If anyone is interesting in knowing more about Lean methodology then please do not hesitate to get in touch.
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