XPS stands for Company-specific Production Systems, and describes corporate-wide improvement programs that aim to improve and maintain a competitive operation system. Usually, XPSs are simply referred to as Lean Production Systems.
To follow up my previous post about the effect of implementing lean in the global Volvo Group, here’s one short story of the implementation of the Volvo Production System (VPS) in the truck assembly plant in New River Valley, Virginia, USA.
Mr. Ebly Sanchez presents the Volvo Production System at POMS Atlanta May 2014 (Photo: author).
Multinational companies roll out lean programs or XPSs. The objective is to improve the operational performance of all the factories in the global network. The party killer? It is documented that about 70 % of all general change programs fail [1], and similar figures has been suggested for lean [2]. So, do lean programs really pay off?
It is Winter Olympics in Sochi. The world’s best winter sport athletes use world-class winter sport equipment to fight for honor and gold. Just like the athletes use exercise regimens to become stronger and quicker, equipment manufacturers can deploy lean production programs to better their production. This post highlights a gold standard lean production system developed by a leading sports equipment manufacturer.
When it comes to improving production, a standard question is this one: What are the differences between Lean, Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, Agile, Quick Response Manufacturing (QRM), and all the other prescribed improvement programs? Underlying the question is a rational need to find a way to navigate through the jungle of “solutions”, and select the one(s) that fit exactly your firm. In this blog post, I suggest that considering “Concept Epicenters” might be helpful in making the right strategic choices.
This post is the original manuscript of the introduction letter in the latest issue of the Lean Management Journal, written by Mr. Ebly Sanchez of Volvo AB and myself.
Good news*: your operations can reach excellence in both Lean and Green. But to hope for success you need to treat Lean and Green as interconnected strategies—not isolated projects. That tip is a key take away from the SMARTLOG seminar “Lean & Green? Yes please both” that we arranged at SINTEF in Trondheim this week. Leading academics and corporations** in Scandinavia were invited to share their latest experiences on the topic. Do Lean and Green go well together?
This week, the 2013 IAAF World Championships in athletics is held in Moscow, Russia. If plant managers watch carefully, they might pick up a few ideas for improving their factories. A specific concept that comes to mind is the notion of Factory Fitness – proposed by Kasra Ferdows (Georgetown University) and Fritz Thurnheer (Hydro ASA) in 2011. The key take away is the following: Whereas becoming lean is right for many, becoming fit is right for all. How to become world champion depends on the event.
The company-specific production system (XPS) of Chrysler is the World Class Manufacturing (WCM) concept, developed by the Fiat Group in 2006. But, what exactly is the WCM? And, what does Chrysler see as keys to success in WCM?
Are Lean and Six Sigma relevant for the 21st Century Manufacturing? An answer to this—and thousand other questions—is being suggested at the annual POMS Conference in Denver, Colorado, this week.
When it comes to quality management, there are surprising similarities between what was suggested in the 80s and what we barely have seen the start of in industry today. In this post, I discuss how Juran’s CWQM-concept from the mid-1980s is both valid and useful for companies rolling out global production improvement programs today.
What do the quality gurus of the 80s think when they read the modern literature on lean & co? Have we moved beyond their original ideas? Or do we just say the same things using fancy, new words? While preparing a paper for the TQM Journal, I recently re-discovered the wisdom of the 80s. And what a wisdom! This is far too important knowledge to discard as blasts from the past; the ideas of Juran, Taguchi, Garvin, Crosby, Shingo, Deming, Feigenbaum and Ishikawa remain fundamental for competitiveness. In this post, I briefly explain the key contributions of each of the top-eight quality gurus. Kudos to the gurus!
My mother just got her new car. After driving a problematic Renault for many years, she decided to go for a Toyota Yaris. That’s an excellent choice for her needs. Despite Toyota’s recent recalls, it continues to deliver the best quality at the best price. The choice of the Toyota also gives me a good opportunity to eventually write about an essential core of my research: The Toyota Production System—the mother of all XPSs.
My mother’s new Toyota Yaris
Visiting more than 40 factories all over the world this year, I have seen both good and not-so-good practices for hosting factory visits. In this post, I share some learning points: here are ten best practices for factory tours.
The winter sport season has barely started as Norway’s victorious skier, Petter Northug, kicks off his mockery season of our neighbor to the east: Sweden. A few days ago, in the Cross Country World Cup in Gällivare, Sweden, Northug passed the finishing line first—before Sweden—and with a Swedish flag. As the anchorman in the Norwegian cross-country relay team, he made sure that Norway won over Sweden at their home ground once again—and took great care that they knew… At the same time, I spent my third week in Sweden this year. As a student of business, I know that Sweden is a world champion in a “sport” that isn’t publicly celebrated but matters thousand times more than cross-country skiing: Manufacturing!
This post is an excerpt of my newly published paper “Managing strategic improvement programs: the XPS program management framework”, published in the peer-reviewed and open-access Journal of Project, Program and Portfolio Management (Vol. 3, No. 1). The complete paper is available for download at my publications pages.
I have visited three former Nissan Diesel factories in Japan this week (today owned by a foreign multinational). The plants operate according to the Nissan Diesel Production System—a bi-product of the famous Nissan Production Way (NPW). I believe that too many lean-lovers focus too heavily on the Toyota Production System (TPS), and know too little about alternative approaches to world-class production. The core idea of an XPS is exactly that the X should be tailored to the company, and not be a TPS-blueprint. In fact, the NPW might provide a better benchmark for many Western manufacturers than the TPS…
Harley-Davidson! …no need for more introduction. This week, I toured the assembly plant in York—the biggest of four H-D manufacturing plants in the US. Together with H-D tattooed bikers with close-fit leather vests, I had the great opportunity of seeing the factory from inside. Harley is well-known for the feelings it evokes in its customer base, and the H-D culture is an unavoidable teaching case in any marketing course. Few other products better symbolize the American dream. Therefore, my question when visiting the York plant was naturally: is it an American dream factory?
Harley-Davidson Factory in York, PA, offers free tours (Photo: better-operations.com)
The Renewable Energy Corporation (REC) has recently closed its second of two factories in its home country Norway. All the state-of-the-art technology and lean improvement initiatives in the world could not save the Norwegian factories from shutting down this year. The REC case is a good example of how benefits of process improvement programmes can be far outweighed by global politics. A natural question to raise is then; under such conditions – is an XPS programme insignificant?
In a recent article, The Economist explains how the electronic giant Honeywell International transformed “from bitter to sweet” over the last eight years following an XPS strategy. In my research I search for evidence for how and why corporate production systems (XPS) succeed and/or fail. The Honeywell article paints a picture of how the Honeywell Operating System (HOS) literally saved the company from bankruptcy and turned it into a multi-billion profit machine. Although the evidence is anecdotal, the managers interviewed in the article provide convincing statements of XPS success:
By working smarter, an XPS can reward you with a well of honey.
It has become extremely popular for companies in any business to pursue the principles of lean production, Six Sigma, TQM, TPM etc. A new development in recent years is that multinational companies develop global and group-wide systems for process improvement based on all these concepts: The XPS. Then, what are the top XPS/lean principles in use?
[This post is an excerpt from my article “People at the wheel – Volvo’s lean journey” co-authored with Ebly Sanchez at Volvo, and freshly published in the Lean Management Journal.]
Lean has become the most popular production paradigm in the 21st century. While some giant companies boldly claim to have reached the “Lean nirvana”, many smaller companies have a much tougher road to the goal. Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often lack the competence, the resources, and the stability to sufficiently set out on the lean journey. On the other hand, because of their size, SMEs might be much quicker to shift perspectives and march together in new directions. The challenge is to succeed in doing so. Here follows a promising roadmap for SMEs that want to become lean.
The last 3 years we have seen a renewed explosion in the industrial interest on lean. Ignited by the two waves of economic downturns since 2008 and fueled by consultancy and lean missionaries, literally every business are now going lean. The shared aim is reducing costs and improving customer service by “working smarter not harder”. Today we have “lean services”, “lean construction”, “lean in the office”, “lean healthcare”, “lean ship-building”, “lean logistics, “lean management” and lean this and that… As lean disseminates from its origin in the automobile industry to services and the public sector, I see the word “lean” growing far beyond its roots and often even intentions. For me the term is losing it’s mojo.
High-tech products are foreseen to build the future competitiveness of the Western economies’ manufacturing sectors. However – what probably will become the most important manufacturing paradigm for the Western economies – lacks proper theoretical concepts and frameworks for industrialisation. Lean & co are simply not suitable enough for high-tech, customized, knowledge-intensive and lower-volume production. In order to remain competitive there has been a need to develop new production concepts with belonging methods, systems and tools for modern high-tech and mass-customised production systems. A good thing then that someone has made an effort to close this gap…
Do you need a company-specific Production System (XPS) to boost your operational improvement? Yes you do. Here are three reasons why:
XPS stands for “Company-specific Production System” [1], and describes a corporate-wide system that aims to improve and maintain a competitive operations system. Many multinational companies have implemented an XPS today: Examples are the Bosch Production System, Boeing Production System, Audi Production System, Lego Production System, John Deere Quality and Production System, Alcoa Business System, REC Production System, Electrolux Manufacturing System, and so on and so on…
Example of a typical XPS: the Electrolux Manufacturing System [2]