Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
fort, reduce space, reduce inventory, reduce engineering time, and pro-
duce greater variety. One of its goals is also to “push responsibility far
down the organizational ladder,” making workers able to control their
own work. Indeed, lean production relies on “an extremely skilled and
a highly motivated workforce,” in which employees become members
of a “community” that must make continuous use of its knowledge and
experience. In the Toyota plants, for instance, Ohno placed a cord above
every workstation, which workers could use to stop the entire assembly
line if they encountered a problem they could not if x; this was in stark
contrast to a mass production line, which could be stopped only by
senior line managers in special circumstances.
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Workers were encour-
aged to identify and rectify the cause of the problem. Lean production
depends not only on teamwork, but also on proactive problem solving
by every worker.
In keeping with the spirit of valuing workers and their work, lean
production depends on close coordination and cooperation between de-
sign engineering and production. At Honda, university-trained mechan-
ical, electrical, and materials engineers spend their fi rst three months
of work assembling cars on the production line.
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This not only makes
the engineers aware of how different aspects of the business work, but
also fosters teamwork and communication. It makes engineers acutely
aware of the problems that their designs are likely to encounter on the
assembly lines, so that they can anticipate or avoid those problems in
their design work.
Lean production also depends on having small inventories of sup-
plies (sometimes called the just-in-time system), which saves on storage
space, and close relationships with suppliers, which allows sharing of
information about products. Having a small inventory means “working
without a safety net”—if there is any defect in a component from a sup-
plier, production will be disrupted. This diffi cultly is mitigated by what
Toyota calls the “fi ve whys” (presumably: “Why? Why? Why? Why?
Why?): “Both the supplier and the assembler are determined to trace
every defective part to its ultimate cause and to ensure that a solution is
devised that prevents this from ever happening again.”
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Problems with
components are solved rather than absorbed into the total cost or time
of production.
The Broad Institute, and particularly its sequencing operations, had
a commercial tenor from its beginning. Its founder and director, Eric
Lander, had taught managerial economics at Harvard Business School
before founding the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Re-
search in 1990. Robert Nicol, the director of the high-throughput Ge-
