Economies of scale

The River Rouge – a divergent legacy

giantknave Brain Farts , , , , ,

ford-model-t-1925-6I expect that you’ve heard of the industrialist Henry Ford (1863 – 1947), but what about his massive ‘River Rouge’ car plant?

If you had gone for a ‘factory visit’ in the late 1920s, what would you have noticed?

The Model T Production line1

Ford wanted to provide a car that the masses could afford to buy – to ‘democratise the automobile’. Enter the Ford Model T – a car designed to be easy to drive and easy to repair, with standard interchangeable parts.

…but it wasn’t just about the car’s design. It was about the design of how the car was made.

In 1906, Ford’s engineers did something different – they experimented with the physical layout of their manufacturing system. They arranged their manufacturing tools in the sequence of processing steps rather than the normal practise of by machine type. This seems ridiculously obvious now (hindsight is a wonderful thing!), and the result was considerably higher productivity. This innovation created a flow in the order of the work but, at this stage of the Ford story, each work step was still done on stationary tables and stands.

In 1913, they took the next breakthrough step: they experimented with the moving assembly line for a small section of the process and, after some fine-tuning, this increased productivity fourfold…..and so the engineers got to work spreading this method throughout the manufacturing value stream.

Ford was constantly reducing his costs, not by ‘cost-cutting’ but through a fanatical focus on creating flow. This was achieved by a combination of continuous (incremental) and breakthrough (step change) improvements…which enabled Ford to pass on these savings by consistently lowering the price of the Model T…which increased demand…which outstripped supply…which meant that ever further production innovations were required to keep up!

Highland ParkA great deal of the experimentation explained above was carried out at the purpose built Highland Park factory. It was six-stories high, with a railroad track running down a central atrium (pictured) and cranes lifting materials from the rail carriages up to balconies that opened to the appropriate floors on either side.

The basic pieces of the Model T started at the top floor and, through the use of chutes, conveyors and tubes between floors and the force of gravity, they made their way down through the various sub-assembly processes until they reached the ground floor final assembly conveyor….and then the completed car could ‘drive off the line’.

River RougeWhilst Highland Park was an amazing feat of engineering, it had its limitations – such as the central crane-way that was probably a huge bottleneck! Henry Ford went for one more innovative jump – he created an enormous horizontal factory complex called the River Rouge2. The site started with raw iron ore and materials and finished with completed automobiles. It had its own ship docks, power generation plant, blast furnaces and rolling mills – all arranged to achieve flow (I’ve added the basic flow over an aerial picture).

“The River Rouge Plant in 1925 produced about one vehicle per minute in a total lead time of about three days and nine hours from steel making to finished vehicle.” (Source: Henry Ford’s book ‘Today and Tomorrow’)

“…as long as it’s black”

You are probably familiar with the famous Henry Ford quote that ‘you can have any colour you like, as long as it’s black’. Today this sounds quaint, even humorous but there’s a seriously important point within: the manufacturing process was not designed to handle variety.

This hadn’t been a problem – people just wanted to be able to afford a car! – but rising standards of living and the birth of modern marketing gave rise to the ‘sophisticated consumer’. The new problem became offering ever wider variety (e.g. different colours, engine choices, trim levels, add-ons….) whilst retaining low-prices (and therefore mass-production costs).

And so to the crux of this post: Lots of organisations from all around America and the world went to the River Rouge to learn…but what did they see…and, therefore, what did they go away to do?

American Manufacturers post World War II.

So American organisations saw scale at the River Rouge.

Unfortunately, achieving the product variety now demanded by customers meant regularly stopping the production line to change tooling to be able to produce the different variants. Delivering variety was seriously hindering speed.

What to do? Here’s what they came up with:

  • Let’s interrupt the flow and decouple the stages within the production line, allowing the different processes to operate independently, and create buffer stocks between each process;
  • Let’s build each process to the largest scale feasible, and then run large batches per product variant through at the fastest rate possible and thus keep the number of changeovers required down to a minimum.
  • Let’s build warehouses to store all the resultant inventory (Work-in-process and finished goods)

This fundamentally changed production from workers producing for the next process step to workers merely producing for inventory. It became a case of ‘make lots and inspect later’. It was virtually a crime to stop the line3 – a disaster for quality!

Of course, once the main process steps were decoupled, their co-location didn’t matter so much. So rather than having a number of end-to-end manufacturing sites across America, the ‘logic’ could extend to…

  • Let’s centralise process steps into ‘centres of excellence’ so that we can increase scale even further! We might end up with, say, a massive steel works in one city, huge sub-assemblies in another city and a mega final assembly yet somewhere else.

…and the above ‘solution’ to variety introduced massive wastes in the forms of transportation across sites; inventory and its motion as it is constantly transferred in and out of the warehouse; over-production and obsolescence; defects through poor quality and rework…and on and on and on.

You could conclude that they ‘unlearned’ (even destroyed) what Henry Ford had achieved before variety had been introduced.

The above led American manufacturers to the hell of:

  • centralised planning, culminating in mega algorithms calculated by Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP ii) computer applications, producing theoretical answers far from reality; and
  • ‘management by results’ using managerial accounting data (unit costs, rates of return, targets, budgets,…) to command and control the work.

This approach, even though it was hugely wasteful, proved profitable until the 1970s…until domestic demand became satiated and globalisation opened up the market to other manufacturers. Things suddenly became rather competitive….

Over in Japan

The Japanese, and Toyota in particular, saw flow at the River Rouge.

Taiichi Ohno (Toyota) realised that flow was the important bit: “ [they] observed that Ford’s plant conserved resources, by having processes linked in a continuous chain and by running slowly enough so that people could stop and fix errors when they occurred.”  (Johnson4)

Japan, unlike America, did not have the luxury of abundant resources after World War II. They couldn’t afford to create huge factories or tie up money in inventory…so they had to find a different way – to do a lot with a little.

Taiichi Ohno came to the conclusion that variety and flow had to go together i.e. “a system where material and work flowed continuously, one order at a time” (Johnson).

This created some clear challenges to work on:

  • rather than simply accepting that machine changeovers took time, Ohno set his workers the challenge of continuously reducing set up and change-over times; and
  • rather than running high-volume batches per variant, Ohno empowered each worker to design and control the steps they performed so that they could perform different steps on each unit that passed through them

In short, he set his people a huge visionary challenge, of working together as a system to think about the incremental, and sometimes giant, steps they could take to handle variety ‘in the line’.

Rather than centralised planning with standardised work dictated to them, the workers were empowered, and encouraged, to think for themselves, to deal with what was in front of them, to experiment and to innovate….and to share what they had learned.

And, wow, they came up with some fabulous techniques such as ‘Single-Minute Exchange of Dies’ (SMED), ‘pull’ using kanban, product supermarkets, ‘stop the line’ using andon cords, visual management, machine ‘right sizing’…and on and on.

I could write about each of these…but I’m not going to (at least not now). The point is not the brilliant innovations themselves. It is the clear and permanent challenges that were set and the constant progress towards them.

You may copy ALL of Toyota’s techniques but they (and other like-minded organisations) will still leave you far behind. Why? Because, whilst you are attempting to copy them they are racing yet further ahead. Indeed, what you copy (even if you ‘get’ the why) may be an out-dated technique before you go live! (This is to compare a static vs. dynamic environment)

What about service?

The Western (?) ‘solution’ for service organisations has, sadly, been virtually the same – scale: to standardise, specialise, centralise and ‘crank up the volume’.

Yet the challenge of handling customer variety is so much bigger: variety for service organisations is virtually infinite – it’s different per customer and, even for a given customer, it differs as their circumstances change.

So should we just pick up the ‘Toyota tool kit’ and get implementing? No. The techniques to meet the challenge will differ. Service is NOT manufacturing.

But can we learn from Toyota? Most certainly – but this must be at the deepest ‘beliefs and behaviours’ level.

The core message from the above is that service organisations should design their system such that the front line are allowed, and enabled, to absorb variety in customer demand.

If you run a service organisation and you have set up:

  • a front office ‘order taking’ function to categorise demand (which can only be based on the limited information available to them), and break it down into standard ‘work objects’ from an allowable catalogue of variants;
  • a ‘workforce management’ function to: prioritise and allocate (i.e. push) these work objects into ‘work queues’, usually by temporal batches (e.g. by day/ shift or weekly);
  • multiple specialised back office silos to churn through their allocated work, ‘motivated’ by activity targets (and incentives) regarding volumes of work performed; and, as a result
  • a complete confusion as to who is taking responsibility for resolving the customer need

…then you have seen scale, through commanding and controlling the work, as the ‘solution’.

If, however, you are on a journey towards:

  • equipping the people at the point of contact with the necessary expertise and freedom to respond to what most customers will predictably want (i.e. the bulk of demand); and
  • where more unusual demand hits the system, allowing and enabling these same ‘front of service’ people to ‘pull’ expertise to assist, yet retaining ownership of the service provision (thereby speeding up their rate of learning and widening their skills and knowledge)

…then you are on a similar track to Ohno: Pursuing flow for each unique customer demand, through revealing and harvesting the passion and pride within your workers.

Update: Here’s the link to an addendum to this post, which came about from a comment below.

Footnotes:

1. Sources: Much of the above comes from early chapters within three books:

  • ‘Relevance Regained’ by H. Thomas Johnson
  • ‘Profit Beyond Measure’ by H. Thomas Johnson
  • ‘Toyota Kata’ by Mike Rother

Other details (including pictures) come from searching around the ‘interweb’ thing.

…and of course the service ending is inspired by the work of John Seddon.

2. Historical point of detail: “The River Rouge was built to produce Model T Fords for decades to come, [but] by the time it was capable of full production later in the [1920s], a factory a tenth its size could have handled the demand for Model Ts.” (Wiley)

i.e. Henry Ford had built this huge production machine but his product had gone out of fashion because its competitor, General Motors, was providing the variety that customers now wanted, albeit using scale to do so. Ford was now in a dash to recover.

3. ‘Stop the line’ crime: Workers knew that managers wanted them to make as many as possible, with no ‘down time’. I understand that this is where the phrase to ‘throw a spanner in the works’ comes from…which refers to a disgruntled worker ‘accidentally’ dropping a tool into the assembly line mechanism so that the line stopped and they all got a break whilst the cause was found and rectified.

4. A fresh giant: Johnson is a giant for me, and I’ve been meaning to add his ‘giant bio’ to this blog for ages now…I have finally done so 🙂

False Economies

giantknave Brain Farts , , , , , ,

chasing moneySo I expect we have all heard the phrase ‘Economies of Scale’ and have a view on what is meant.

The phrase is probably covered within the first pages of ‘Economics 101’ and every ‘Beginner’s book of management’. I think the idea has even leaked out of these domains and is used in every-day parlance. It is seen merely as ‘common sense’*.

(* please read and reflect upon a hugely important quote on ‘common sense’ when you get to the end of this post)

So what is the thinking behind ‘Economies of Scale’?

Let’s start at the beginning: Why is it said that we benefit from ‘economies’ as an organisation grows larger?

The idea in a nutshell: To run a business you need resources. As you grow, you don’t necessarily need a linear increase in those resources.

Basic example: A 1-man business premises needs a toilet (if he needs to go, well he needs to go). But when the next person joins the growing company he doesn’t get his own personal toilet written into his ‘remuneration package’. No, he has to share the existing toilet with his fellow employee. You can see this logic for lots of different things (one building, one IT system, one HR manager….), but I reckon a toilet is about as basic as it gets.

The theory goes that as the volume of output goes up* then unit costs come down (where unit cost = total cost/ units of output).

(* I’m writing generally now…I’ve moved on from toilet humour 🙂 )

It should be noted that the classical economists that came up with the theory did accept the idea of ‘diseconomies of scale’: that of costs rising as growing organisations become more complex, more bureaucratic…basically harder to manage.

You’ll likely see all this expressed in economics text books with a very simple diagram (below) and, voila, it is surely so!

economies of scale

Getting into more specifics about the phenomenon, three distinct reasons are given for those scale economies:

  • Indivisibility: Some resources aren’t divisible – you can’t (easily) have half a toilet, a quarter of a receptionist, 1/8th of a manager and so on.
  • Specialisation along with Standardisation: this reason goes way back to the writings of Adam Smith and his famous book called ‘The Wealth of Nations’ (1776). In it, he used the example of a pin factory to explain the concept of ‘the division of labour’. He explained that one person performing all the steps necessary to making a pin could perhaps make only 20 pins a day but if the pin-making process were broken up into a series of limited and standardised operations, with separate people performing them in a joined-up line, productivity could rise to thousands of pins per day per worker.
  • Machinery: Investing in ever larger machines mean that they can turn out more and at a faster rate…and our beloved unit costs come down. In service organisations the equivalent could be a ‘bigger, better’ telephone system, IT system,…etc.

Sounds like a water tight case to me – ‘Economies of scale’ proven, case dismissed!

Not so fast…a few dissenting voices:

“All the above seems to be about managing our costs? We are concerned about where this might lead – shouldn’t we be first and foremost focused on delivering value to our customers?”

“We’ve got really low unit costs at lots of our activities…and we keep on making ‘economies of scale’ changes to get them even lower…but this doesn’t seem to be reducing our total costs (they remain annoyingly high)…are we missing something?”

“Gosh, that ‘economies of scale’ average cost curve looks so simple…so all we need to know is when we are at the optimum size (Q) and stop growing. Easy! Can someone tell us when we reach that point? How about a nice warning signal when we are getting close? What do you mean it’s just ‘theoretical’ and no-one actually knows?!”

“I’ve heard that ‘behavioural economics’ is debunking a central assumption within Adam Smith’s classical economic ideas. Apparently we are all human beings (with our own unique purposes), not rational robots!” (Nice link: Who cooked Adam Smith’s dinner?)

“We don’t make pins. We are a service organisation. We have much variety in demand and our customers are ‘co-producers’ within our process…specialisation and standardisation can do much harm to them, and therefore us!”

Meanwhile, on another planet…

Taiichi Ohno developed the Toyota Production System (TPS). In so doing, he used totally different thinking, with profound results.

(Note: Historians have identified a core reason for this difference in thinking as the heavily resource-constrained context that Japan found itself in after the 2nd world war. This was in complete contrast to 1950s America that had an abundance of resources and booming customer demand. In short, Ohno had to think differently to succeed.)

The big difference – Flow, not scale, as the objective: Ohno concentrated on total cost, not unit costs. He realised that, first and foremost, what matters is how smoothly and economically a unit of demand is satisfied, from initial need through to its completion (in the eyes of the customer).

The flow is everything that happens between these points and, as well as all the value-adding steps, this includes:

  • all the time that nothing is happening (a huge proportion of a traditional process)
  • all the steps that occur but shouldn’t really need to (i.e. they are non-value adding);
  • all the repeat and/or additional steps needed because something wasn’t done right; and (the worst of all)
  • everything needed to be done when the customer returns with the good or service as not being acceptable (where this could be days, weeks or even months later)

There’s no point in a particular activity being made ‘efficient’ if this is detrimental to the flow.

‘Economies of scale’ thinkers (and their management accountants) are obsessed with how much each activity costs and then targeting reductions. Their belief is that, by reducing the costs of each activity, these aggregated savings will come off the bottom line. Such thinking has led to:

  • ‘large machine thinking’ (which also relates to centralisation/ shared services);
  • ‘batch thinking’ to make these resources work (allegedly) more efficiently;
  • ‘push thinking’ to keep these resources always working – high utilisation rates are king; and
  • inflexibility due to highly specified roles and tasks

…which cause a huge amount of waste and failure demand.

Ackoff made incredibly clear in his systems TED talk (using the automobile as his example) that trying to optimise the components of a system will not optimise the system as a whole. In fact, the reverse will be true and we can expect total costs to rise.

Rather than trying to get the cost of a specific activity down, Toyota (and other system thinkers) focus on the end-to-end horizontal flow (what the customer feels). This is a different (systemic) way of thinking and delivers far better outcomes.

It is no coincidence that Ohno is also credited with much of the thinking around waste. It is only by thinking in terms of flow that waste becomes visible, its sources understandable, and therefore its reduction and removal possible.

In short, Cost is in flow, not activity.

Flow thinking has led the design of systems to:

  • ‘right-size thinking’ and ‘close to customer thinking’;
  • ‘single-piece flow thinking’;
  • ‘pull thinking’; and
  • handling variety ‘in the line’ thinking (Note to self: a future post to be written)

These all seem counter-intuitive to an ‘economies of scale’ mindset, yet deliver far better outcomes.

(How) does this apply to service?

Okay, so Ohno made cars. You might therefore question whether the above is relevant to service organisations. Here are examples of what the ‘Economies of scale’ mantra has given us in service, broken down into comments on each of specialisation, standardisation, centralisation and automation:

Specialised resources: Splitting roles into front, (middle) and back offices; into demand takers (and ‘failure’ placators), transactional processors, back room expert support teams and senior ‘authorisers’…meaning that:

  • we don’t deal with the customer when/ where they want;
    • causing delay, creating frustration – which needs handling;
    • incorrect setting of customer expectations;
    • unclear ownership, leading to the customer having to look out for themselves
  • we have multiple hand-offs;
    • causing batching, transportation, misunderstandings, re-work (re-reading, re-entering, repeating, revising);
    • we break a unit of value demand into separate ‘work objects’ which we (hope to) assign out, track separately, synchronise and bring back together again (…requiring technology);
  • we collect information to ‘pass on’ (…requiring technology)
    • often passing on incomplete and/or incorrect information (or in Seddon’s words “dirty data”), which escalates to the waste of dealing with the defects as the unit progresses down the wrong path;
  • we categorise, prioritise, allocate and schedule work around all these roles (…requiring technology)
  • …all of the above lengthens the time to deliver a service and compromises the quality of the outcome, thus generating much failure demand (which we then have to deal with)

Standardised activities: Trying to achieve a standard time (such as Average Handling Times) to perform a standard task (using standard templates/ scripts) that appears to best fit with the category that ‘we’ (the organisation) jammed the customer into

  • rather than listening to the customer’s need and attempting to deliver against it (i.e. understanding and absorbing customer variety);

Centralisation: Seeing ‘shared services’ as the answer using the “there must be one good way to do everything” mantra.

  • creating competition for shared service resource between business units and the need for SLAs and performance reporting;
  • requiring some ‘super’ IT application that can do it all (“well, that’s what the software vendor said!”);
  • ‘dumbing down’ the differences between services (and thus losing the so-called ‘value proposition’)
  • loosening the link between the customer and the (now distant) service.

Automation: Continually throwing Technology at ‘the problem’ (usually trying to standardise with an ‘out of the box’ configuration because that will be so much more efficient won’t it) and, in so doing, creating an ever-increasing and costly IT footprint.

Whilst technology is amazing (and can be very useful), computers are brilliant at performing algorithms (e.g. calculations and repetition) but they are rubbish at absorbing variety, and our attempts at making them do so will continually create failure demand and waste.

In summary: ‘Economies of scale’ thinking is more damaging in service because of the greater variety in demand and the nature of the required outcomes.

To close:

This post isn’t saying that scale is wrong. It is arguing that this isn’t the objective. Much harm is, and has been, done by blindly following an activity focused logic (and the resultant ‘specialise, standardise, centralise, automate’ mantra)

Further, I get that some of you might say “you’ve misunderstood Steve…we aren’t all running around saying we must be big(ger)!”…but I’d counter that the ‘economies of scale’ conventional wisdom is implied in a relentless activity cost focus.

Put simply, “Economy comes from flow, NOT scale” (Seddon)

End notes

Beware ‘Common sense’:

“There is a time to admire the grace and persuasive power of an influential idea, and there is a time to fear its hold over us.

The time to worry is when the idea is so widely shared that we no longer even notice it, when it is so deeply rooted that it feels to us like plain common sense.

At the point when objections are not answered anymore because they are no longer even raised, we are not in control: we do not have the idea; it has us.” (Alfie Kohn)

Credit: The ‘Economies of scale’ explanation comes from reading a John Seddon paper.

Being fair to Adam Smith: He understood that the specialisation of tasks can lead to “the almost entire corruption and degeneracy of the great body of the people [the workers]. … unless government takes some pains to prevent it.” i.e. it might be great for the factory owners…but their workers are people, not machines.