The "3 Mu" of Lean Design

By Jon Miller | Post Date: September 27, 2008 6:42 PM | Comments: 1

Elimination of the "3 mu" is at the heart of kaizen and lean management. The three Japanese
words are muri, mura and muda. The latter is most commonly known as waste and categorized
in the 7 types of overproduction, inventory, defects, transportation, waiting, motion and the
waste of processing itself. These wastes are visible through observation, and while muri and
mura are less visible we feel them more directly and are more aware of them than muda. Muri
and mura are often the precursors to the wastes.
Muri is something that is unreasonable, overly burdensome or simply cannot be done. A classic
example is to place 10 tons of load on a truck that is rated for 5 tons. That is not reasonable and
will result in less than even performance. Mura is variability or unevenness and this often results
from muri, or trying to do too much or having too little to do. Following the example of the
truck, mura would be having only 5 tons to load on the truck on some days, but 20 tons on other
days. The result of this variation may be that you try to load 10 tons, even though this is an
unreasonable load. As a result of these things we have breakdowns, defects, excessive motion
and other wastes.
All lean management, whether it be in manufacturing, logistics, healthcare or knowledge work
focuses on getting rid of muri, mura and muda in order to improve performance. In order to be
efficient about getting rid of waste and not always be reacting to the waste we see on the
surface, we need to go upstream to how the products, services or the work itself is designed. We
need lean design or "design for lean management" in the broadest sense of these terms.
Viewing work done in product design as a process helps us to identify and eliminate wasteful
steps within the design process. If we think of design work in terms of a continuous and smooth
stream of activity, we can imagine better ways of performing the work to get rid of rework,
delays or overcomplicated process steps. Mapping the process as it is done today and
redesigning it to focus on fast, high quality hand-offs will result in reduced cost and time to
market.
Muri or overburden in the design process for example may be the need to work long hours to
meet a tight schedule. We recognize this sort of overburden readily. Typically this comes from
mura or unevenness in our workload. A design decision is made, a work package is release and
suddenly we are twice as busy as the week before when we were waiting for the latest iteration
to come back from another hand-off point. The end result of this mura and muri can be muda
when we make errors under pressure, are forced to cut corners or release designs before they
have been fully tested.
It can be particularly hard for people in the creative part of the design process to define what
waste is within their work. The customer requirements may be unclear or undefined, yet some
sort of work must still be done in the absence of clear requirements. That is one challenge.
Another challenge may simply be one of belief that design work is essentially creative and
cannot be standardized or quantified. Experience tells us that Pareto's Law applies even here and
that even within creative work we can find 80% of work that is repetitive within or between
projects and 20% that is truly a unique combination of "never before" activities. Lean design,
like much of lean elsewhere is a mental, not a technical challenge.
The focus of lean product development should be to streamline the routine and repetitive
portions of this design work so that there is more time for the value-added or creative work. The
creation or dusting off and use of checklists, standard items or design elements, documenting the
appropriate and effective use of software design tools, and referring to a database of past lessons
learned are only a few ways that the design process can use basic lean principles to improve
knowledge worker productivity.
As design teams become more global the time and quality of hand-offs between members of the
design team suffer. Design reviews may take more time or produce decisions of a lower quality,
or no decision at all. It may simply be muri to try to connect a team of people in 5 different
continents and time zones in a coordinated and speedy effort. At the very least it becomes harder
to see and reduce the variability in work speeds and design process outcomes when members of
the same design team do not occupy the same obeya (open room), much less the same continent.
This too may be a gap that inexpensive video conferencing technology will eventually bridge,
but that will only address 20% of the problem, the other 80% that is behavioral.
While having a global design team has advantages in terms of capturing lower cost or higher
quality resources, this lack of visibility increases the cost tremendously in many cases.
Redundant work, lost or non-transferred knowledge, an unawareness of true conditions on the
gemba (place where the work is actually done) and certainly lost time in travel between sites
when face-to-face meetings finally happen. Considering the cost of delays in speed to market,
troubles during production ramp up, and the escape of defects into the market, the enlightened
design leader should question if the costs and benefits balance out or whether there is in fact a
net loss due to muri and mura imposed by a unconnected design team.
Even when the design teams works within the same country or same building there can be
delays and stagnation in the flow of information and design work. The outsourcing of design
tasks elements that are considered non-core or routine to contractors or suppliers is another way
in which mura can be introduced in the unevenness or variability of work quality as well as muri
or overburden, should these outside sources lack the level of technical or product knowledge and
design capability. The pursuit of lower costs and the shifting of design work beyond the core
internal team, intended to save cost, can result in more waste downstream.
Why go back to the obeya concept of having the whole team in one place, in this global
economy? Why bring people together in a single open room to cooperate on design work, close
to gemba or production site? In this day of off-shored-everything is it even feasible to reconnect
these resources? Performance improvement relies on measuring target versus actual, and this is
only effective when there is a place of work in which the flow of work can be observed and
measured. Why do we want to measure creative work? Lean management is based on
continuously improving (kaizen) based on a standard (regardless of how poor it may be), and
lean design is no different.
Lean design should neither overly rely on nor abandon online collaboration tools for design
teams. These tools need to be designed around processes which flow from person to person as
directly as possible, based on agreed and standardized work contents, measured against targets
and improved regularly through reflection on the performance gaps and root cause analysis.
Trying to enable lean design any other way may simply be muri.
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Very good your comment about 3M`s. Congratulation

Poster: Rafael | Post Date: November 7, 2010 12:17 PM

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