Let’s Look At Lean Manufacturing

Summary

As we build our picture of how DevOps came about and why it is needed, we look at decades of lessons learned in manufacturing through lean manufacturing and the value stream.

Let’s Look At Lean Manufacturing

The Three Ways and lean manufacturing are the principles from which DevOps behaviours can be taken and include decades of lessons learning in manufacturing and high reliability organisations. So, let’s go deeper in and take a closer look at lean principles and value streams.

What is the manufacturing value stream?

The value steam is one of the fundamental concepts in lean, and we’ll start by looking at this in manufacturing. Simply put the manufacturing value steam is the process undertaken when a customer orders a product. This is the sequence of actions and activities needed to design ,produce and deliver the product or service. To do all this quickly and efficiently a few things need to be put in place. We need a smooth and even flow of work, which will mean techniques like small batch sizes and preventing defects being passed down stream.

What is the technology value stream?

If we look at the above we can see how it works physically and practically. Now we need to take those same patterns and principles and apply them to technology work. The technology value stream is the process of converting a business hypotheses into a service, and this must deliver value to the customer. We first accept work in development, the idea is transformed into feature specification and this is then implemented in code into the service being built. We have to make sure we are delivering fast flow because value is only understood when the service is running in production.

Deployment lead time

It all starts with lean product development, or design and development, which is work that is uncertain and can vary wildly. This is creative work and process times also vary wildly. Next comes testing and operations, or lean management. This requires great expertise and creativity, but unlike the first phase of work, strives to be predictable and to not include varying times and work output. The emphasis is on low defects and short lead times.

The design and development value stream and the test and operations value stream work best with small batches of work. The goals is to see testing and operations occurring at the same time as design and development, to create fast flow and high quality. Small batches work better because we can build high quality into every part of the value stream, unlike large batches.

Lead time is the customer experience and so we usually focus our attention to improvement there, but the process time to lead time also measures our efficiency and needs to be our focus also. This will create fast flow and short lead times as we are reducing the time work is simply waiting to be dealt with. The lead time starts when the order is placed, but the process time only starts when work starts, meaning there is a vacuum of time while work is waiting to be processed. Here we can see how we are losing time and how our focus needs to shift.