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The Lean Post / Articles / Lean in the Time of Coronavirus

Lean in the Time of Coronavirus

Problem Solving

Lean in the Time of Coronavirus

By Tom Ehrenfeld and James (Jim) Womack, PhD

March 9, 2020

While lean offers no direct countermeasure to tackling the current coronavirus health challenge, Jim Womack points out in this podcast that key lean practices such as just-in-time supply chains should not be mistakenly viewed as compromised practices that contribute to maladaptive responses.

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Another global crisis, and another rush to fault just-in-time supply chains and practice as a weakness in this time of high alert. This recent Marketplace story is essentially the same article that has appeared in the Wall Street Journal fourteen years ago, as Jim Womack notes in this conversation about the value of lean in a time of cholera—wait, coronavirus—wait, let’s just say…crisis. “The media always pretty much reacts the same way, that the world is being disrupted because we have just in time supply chains,” he says.

Womack reminds us that just-in-time supply chains are not a liability in a time of crisis; and in fact that having a surplus of spare parts in process is never a good thing:

“It’s a bad thing because it cost a lot of money and it doesn’t create the good thing, which is the ability to immediately respond to a spike in demand, because there’s no capacity to translate or convert those parts into usable products. They’re constrained. And hey, by the way, here’s another thing you could do. Just imagine that you said, ‘Gosh, what we need is for every car plant that’s running at reasonably full output, we should have another car plant that’s mothballed.’”

Listen to this conversation on the LEI podcast below.

You can download a transcript here.

And, while you are doing so, check out this 2006 essay Just In Time, Just In Case and Just Plain Wrong.

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Written by:

Tom Ehrenfeld
|
James (Jim) Womack, PhD

About Tom Ehrenfeld

Tom Ehrenfeld is a writer and editor living in Cambridge, MA. A former writer/editor with Inc. Magazine and Harvard Business Review, he is the author of The Startup Garden: How Growing A Business Grows You. He works as a consulting editor for LEI and with many other lean authors. Nine of his edited books have won the Shingo Research…

Read more about Tom Ehrenfeld

About James (Jim) Womack, PhD

Widely considered the father of the lean movement, Womack has been talking and publishing about creating value through continuous innovation around deep customer understanding for many years. In the late eighties, he and Dan Jones led MIT’s International Motor Vehicle Research Program (IMVP), which introduced the term “lean” to describe…

Read more about James (Jim) Womack, PhD

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