Spaghetti

The Toyota Production System is sometimes dismissed by product development people as being irrelevant to them.  After all, “Production” in the context of the world’s second-largest auto company (or maybe first now, given the devastating downturn in the domestic auto industry) implies mass production.  And product developers are not generally thinking in that space.  Sure, what’s being developed may ultimately be made in the hundreds of thousands or millions, but still, that’s not necessarily an immediate concern for all those who are not manufacturing engineers and executives.

But TPS, as it is commonly known among its community of users, could arguably have the word Process in place of Production.  It is about getting things done in the most efficient and effective way possible, not just about building Camrys.

One of the tools used in TPS is process mapping.  Which is simply tracking how work is done as something moves within a system.  So in the case of, say, manufacturing a Camry, it is generally how the car-in-becoming moves through the factory.  Not only is it a matter of the physical space (i.e., how many feet does it go from start to finish), but also how it is—or isn’t—worked on as it moves (or sits).

Oftentimes (and generally not when the issue is building Camrys, as they’ve figured this out) the resulting map is called a “spaghetti diagram.”  While we can conceptually imagine that something goes from A to B to C. . . etc., in a straightforward manner, in point of fact, it generally doesn’t.  It goes back and forth.  It moves.  It stops.  It waits for someone to work on it.  And then it may go back again to where it came from.  And again.  The line on the map looks like, well, a plate of spaghetti.

This is not just a manufacturing issue.  In point of fact, factories are generally more lasagna-like (straight rows) that product development programs.  People in factories of all types and sizes—from aerospace to white goods, from job shops to multinationals—have been long schooled in TPS.  But product developers?

Whether you are a designer or an engineer, a marketer or a manager, start thinking about the process.  Start paying attention to the movement of ideas to reality.  Are things moving or waiting?  Are they moving forward or gyrating?  Is it typically the case that the flow is something other than straightforward?  Is your process map so much spaghetti?

Pasta is good in Italian restaurants or in Mom’s kitchen, but not in our product development processes.