Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
spaces are structured and monitored by computers; samples and people
are represented there as data too.
When I visited the Broad Sequencing Center at 320 Charles, one of
the i rst people I spoke to was Meredith, the manager of the Molecular
Biology Production Group. Her offi ce sat on a fl oor above and over-
looking the sequencing lab, and as I traveled along the hallway I peered
down on the workers busy at their lab benches. The i rst thing I noticed
in Meredith's offi ce was that the bookshelves were almost empty except
for about i fteen copies of a single topic:
The Machine That Changed
the World: The Story of Lean Production
(1991). I asked the obvious
question: Why all the topics? “It's required reading for my employees,”
she told me, “every new person on my team gets a copy.” Perhaps sur-
prisingly, this isn't a topic about molecular biology, or about any natu-
ral science, but about assembly lines.
The tagline of
The Machine That Changed the World
is “How Ja-
pan's secret weapon in the global auto wars will revolutionize Western
industry.” The topic is based on a detailed study of the Japanese auto-
mobile industry by three of the directors of the International Motor
Vehicle Program at MIT, James Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel
Roos. “Lean production” (in contrast to Henry Ford's “mass produc-
tion”) is the name they give to the techniques deployed in the Japanese
car industry (developed largely by Eiji Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno) in
order to manufacture high-quality products at a low cost.
The craft producer uses highly skilled workers and simple but
fl exible tools to make exactly what the consumer asks for—one
item at a time. . . . The mass producer uses narrowly skilled pro-
fessionals to design products made by unskilled or semiskilled
workers tending expensive, single-purpose machines. These
churn out standardized products in very high volume. . . . The
lean producer, by contrast, combines the advantages of craft and
mass production, while avoiding the high cost of the former and
the rigidity of the latter. Toward this end, lean producers employ
teams of multiskilled workers at all levels of the organization
and use highly fl exible, increasingly automated machines to pro-
duce volumes of products in enormous variety.
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Because of the expense of equipment and its intolerance of disruption,
mass production tends toward oversupply of workers, space, and raw
materials; workers are bored, and there is little variety in products. Lean
production, on the other hand, has the potential to reduce human ef-
