Lean Manufacturing Quotes.

This is a huge assortment of lean manufacturing quotes. If you are involved with continuous improvement you will find something of interest here. And if you don’t think you are involved with continuous improvement you need to get involved. If a company isn’t continuously improving then they are slowly going out of business.

“All we are doing is looking at the timeline from the moment a customer gives us an order to the point we collect the cash. And we are reducing that timeline in the value stream by removing non value-added wastes.” ~Taiichi Ohno
“Learning is not compulsory… neither is survival.” ~W. Edwards Deming
“Improvement usually means doing something that we have never done before.” ~Shigeo Shingo
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one.” ~Mark Twain
“Everything can be improved.” ~Clarence W. Barron

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” ~W. Edwards Deming
“A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.” ~Andrew Grove
“The most effective way to improve productivity is to eliminate work.” ~William E. Conway Jr.
“The Toyota style is not to create results by working hard. It is a system that says there is no limit to people’s creativity. People don’t go to Toyota to ‘work’ they go there to ‘think’.” ~Taiichi Ohno

“A relentless barrage of “why’s” is the best way to prepare your mind to pierce the clouded veil of thinking caused by the status quo. Use it often.” ~Shigeo Shingo
“Automation and technology don’t cure behavioral ruts: they just create new instances of them.” ~Kenneth Goldsmith
“Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” ~George Bernard Shaw
“Lean Automation – the position of the words shows lean comes before automation. By leaning out your operation you may find out your ROI for automation is not what you thought.” ~Dave Waters
“Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) Cycle, a cornerstone of continuous improvement. The Japanese term for continuous improvement is kaizen and is the process of making incremental improvements, no matter how small, and achieving the lean goal of eliminating all waste that adds cost without adding to value.” ~Jeffrey K. Liker
“Make your workplace into showcase that can be understood by everyone at a glance.” ~Taiichi Ohno

“I say an hour lost at a bottleneck is an hour out of the entire system. I say an hour saved at a non-bottleneck is worthless. Bottlenecks govern both throughput and inventory.” ~Eli M. Goldratt, The Goal
“Quality management is needed because nothing is simple anymore, if indeed it ever was.” ~Phil Crosby.
“If you don’t understand how to run an efficient operation, new machinery will just give you new problems of operation and maintenance. The sure way to increase productivity is to better administrate man and machine.” ~W. Edwards Deming
“If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution.” ~Steve Jobs

“You must have long-range goals to keep you from being frustrated by short-term failures.” ~Charles C. Noble
“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” ~Albert Einstein
“If you are going to do TPS (Toyota Production System) you must do it all the way. You also need to change the way you think. You need to change how you look at things.” ~Taiichi Ohno
“We do not suggest that you throw your MRP systems away. MRP should be used for purposes of planning and pull mechanisms should be used as much as possible for purposes of execution.” ~Kenneth E. Kirby
“Quality is everyone’s responsibility.” ~W. Edwards Deming.

“I’m proud to be Japanese and I wanted my country to succeed. I believed my system was a way that could help us become a modern industrial nation. That is why I had no problem with sharing it with other Japanese companies, even my biggest competitors.” ~Taiichi Ohno
“Good is the enemy of great. That’s why so few things become great.” ~James C. Collins
“Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.” ~Henry Ford
“Quality is the result of a carefully constructed cultural environment. It has to be the fabric of the organization, not part of the fabric.” ~Philip Crosby.
“The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.” ~Helmut Schmidt

“Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change.” ~Tom Peters.
“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.” ~H. James Harrington
“The result of long-term relationships is better and better quality, and lower and lower costs.” ~W. Edwards D
“If a company isn’t continuously improving then it is slowly dying.” ~Dave Waters
“With Lean Six Sigma, the tools are the easy part, changing organizational culture is the hard part.” ~John Novak
“Finished goods are products that we have made that no one wants.” “Raw materials are products that we have bought that we don’t need.” ~Tom Greenwood
“Continuous improvement is not about the things you do well — that’s work. Continuous improvement is about removing the things that get in the way of your work. The headaches, the things that slow you down, that’s what continuous improvement is all about.” ~Bruce Hamilton

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” ~Antoine de Saint Exupery
“Don’t say it can not be done, rather say, you don’t know how to do it yet.” ~Tomas Bata
“No one knows the cost of a defective product – don’t tell me you do. You know the cost of replacing it, but not the cost of a dissatisfied customer.” ~W. Edwards Deming
“Without change there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement. Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable.” ~William Pollard
“If you aren’t improving you are going out of business.” ~Dave Waters
“Don’t water your weeds.” ~Harvey Mackay
“Long-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy is required of any management that seeks transformation. The timid and the fainthearted, and the people that expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment.” ~W. Edwards Deming
“Sometimes no problem is a sign of a different problem” ~Mark Rosenthal, author of The Lean Thinker

“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” ~W. Edwards Deming
“When you go out into the workplace, you should be looking for things that you can do for your people there. You’ve got no business in the workplace if you’re just there to be there. You’ve got to be looking for changes you can make for the benefit of the people who are working there.” ~Taiichi Ohno
“Finished goods are products that we have made that no one wants.” “Raw materials are products that we have bought that we don’t need.” ~Tom Greenwood
“What get measured, gets managed.” ~Peter Drucker
“If your supply chain runs without many problems you either have a great supply chain or running very fat.” ~Dave Waters.
“Strive for continuous improvement, instead of perfection.” ~Kim Collins
“If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.” ~W. Edwards Deming
“A relentless barrage of “why’s” is the best way to prepare your mind to pierce the clouded veil of thinking caused by the status quo. Use it often.” ~Shigeo Shingo
“Where there is no standard there can be no kaizen.” ~Taiichi Ohno, father of the Toyota Production System
“Operating under the conscious capitalism model will show that businesses are the true value creators that can push all of humanity upward for continuous improvement.” ~John Mackey
“Something is wrong if workers do not look around each day, find things that are tedious or boring, and then rewrite the procedures. Even last month’s manual should be out of date” ~Taiichi Ohno

“There are many experts on how things have been done up to now. If you think something could use a little improvement, you are the expert.” ~Robert Breault
“Are you too busy for improvement? Frequently, I am rebuffed by people who say they are too busy and have no time for such activities. I make it a point to respond by telling people, look, you’ll stop being busy either when you die or when the company goes bankrupt.” ~Shigeo Shingo
“Before you say you can’t do something…TRY IT.” ~Sakichi Toyoda
“…a person and an organization must have goals, take actions to achieve those goals, gather evidence of achievement, study and reflect on the data and from that take actions again. Thus, they are in a continuous feedback spiral toward continuous improvement. This is what ‘Kaizan’ means.” ~W. Edwards Deming
“When solving problems, dig at the roots instead of just hacking at the leaves.” ~Anthony J. D’Angelo
“When you are out observing on the gemba, do something to help them. If you do, people will come to expect that you can help them and will look forward to seeing you again on the gemba.” ~Taiichi Ohno

“Real waste lurks in places that don’t look like waste.” ~ Shigeo Shingo
“Kanban is like the milkman. Mom didn’t give the milkman a schedule. Mom didn’t use MRP. She simply put the empties on the front steps and the milkman replenished them. That is the essence of a pull system” ~Ernie Smith
“Nature does constant value stream mapping — it’s called evolution.” ~Carrie Latet
“It’s pretty simple. If you have an environment where people aren’t afraid to speak up, and you listen to them things will get better.” ~Dave Waters
“The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize.” ~Shigeo Shingo
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” ~Charles Darwin

“The message of the Kaizen strategy is that not a day should go by without some kind of improvement being made somewhere in the company.” ~Masaaki Imai
“Many good American companies have respect for individuals, and practice Kaizen and other TPS {Toyota Production System} tools. But what is important is having all of the elements together as a system. It must be practiced every day in a very consistent manner–not in spurts–in a concrete way on the shop floor.” ~Fujio Cho, President, Toyota Motor Corporation
“Many people think that Lean is about cutting heads, reducing the work force or cutting inventory. Lean is really a growth strategy. It is about gaining market share and being prepared to enter in or create new markets.” ~Ernie Smith

“If we reduce batch sizes by half, we also reduce by half the time it will take to process a batch. That means we reduce queue and wait by half as well. Reduce those by half, and we reduce by about half the total time parts spend in the plant. Reduce the time parts spend in the plant and our total lead time condenses. And with faster turn-around on orders, customers get their orders faster.” ~Eliyahu M. Goldratt, The Goal
“There are three kinds of leaders. Those that tell you what to do. Those that allow you to do what you want. And Lean leaders that come down to the work and help you figure it out.” ~John Shook
“Call it lean, call it six sigma, call it continuous improvement… what matters is that you get better every day. Don’t know how to start? Go ask the people doing the work what would help them with their jobs. Be open minded. It is about the people doing the work, it isn’t about you.” ~Dave Waters
“Andon works only when you teach your employees the importance of bringing problems to the surface so they can be quickly solved.” ~Jeffrey K. Liker
“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” ~Henry Ford