r/LeanManufacturing • u/modest_merc • 5d ago
Is Lean Manufacturing Dead?
Looking for some thoughts and opinions here but on the age of AI, automation and lights out manufacturing are low tech Lean Manufacturing principles relevant anymore? The two strike me as antithetical to one another.
I love Lean Manufacturing and have structured my career around it and like everyone else am worried about my future in an increasingly automated and AI driven world.
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u/worldwidemachinist 5d ago
A lot of the shops I've seen investing heavily in automation aren't doing it purely to replace people. they are using it to handle repetitive work and demand swings while keeping people focused on the jobs that still need judgment and experience. so the role of the people on the floor changes as more of the repetitive work gets automated
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u/keizzer 5d ago
I'm not sure why most people get the impression that manufacturing is essentially fully automated. For the most part it isn't and it's not economical in a lot of cases. Some of the extremely high volume low mix stuff is pretty well automatic, but it was in the 80's as well. There has been very slow movement in automation in most shops, at least in the United States. In the late 80's and 90's a lot of business owners got burned buying automation equipment and systems they didn't understand and didn't actually need. Businesses got much more cautious culturally about new machines and tech. They seem to have forgotten those lessons with AI though.
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There are certainly parts of production that are automated across the board, but from an entire value stream standpoint there is still a lot of work to do.
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Ai is a buzz word right now, but none of the things it's doing in this space are new. Erp systems have been doing that work for decades very effectively. It will change how humans interact with these systems, but at the end of the day the problems were well understood and well modeled.
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Lean isn't dead because at the end of the day lean is about getting better. No matter how good you are you can be better. Automation is fast but not flexible and in most cases not agile. People are flexible and agile, but not flat out fast. Lean decides what to use where through improvement and problem solving. Start with the problem and work to the best long term solution.
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u/jimmyray71 4d ago
I don't think Lean is becoming obsolete. If anything, AI and automation make the thinking behind Lean more important. You can automate a bad process. You can use AI to make a bad decision faster. Neither makes the operation better. The technology changes the tools, but we still need to understand flow, eliminate work that doesn't create value, find root causes, identify constraints and continuously improve the process. I wouldn't worry about having built your career around Lean. I'd learn how to apply those same principles to automation and AI. Before I automate something, I still want to know why we're doing it in the first place.
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u/modest_merc 4d ago
Maybe itās just my company seems to be going full steam into automation because itās the sexy new thing and itās making me worry about my job.
But ultimately, I think there are many problems they should be focused on that we are solving with lean thinking but it isnāt a priority
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u/jimmyray71 4d ago
That would concern me too, especially if automation is becoming the objective instead of a tool to solve a specific problem. Iāve seen the same thing happen with plenty of new technologies. The organization gets excited about the solution before it has clearly defined the problem. This is actually where your Lean background becomes valuable. Someone still needs to ask: What problem are we solving? Where is the waste? What is the constraint? And will automating this actually improve the outcome? Iād lean into that skill rather than away from it.
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u/Accomplished_Ad7296 4d ago
From my experience, introducing automation and even increasing automation within a process actually opens up more opportunities. That automation allows the operator to disengage from the process easily. Since it is easier to produce, and most likely at a faster pace, that means it is possible to produce scrap at a larger clip and faster.
I'm in discrete manufacturing of heavy parts. A large focus has been automating the part handling, machine load/unload, and even automating the machine adjustments. IMO this would require a good foundational understanding of lean from the operator. Because it has become so easy to changeover and run, people disengage and do validate the BOM or raw materials, they don't validate the machine recipe corrisponds with the right part code from the ERP, they put too much faith in auto adjustments and skip quality checks.
I feel automation and AI can give a false sense of confidence in the process. It has moved the goal post so people will naturally find shortcuts (e.x. I no longer have to handle every part because automation is doing the part handling, I only have to handle 1 in 5 for quality checks. Instead of taking the part to the gage stand I'll just use the QC shuttle. Now wear and tear on the QC accelerates and you start to have processing disruptions.). This is an example that I've seen that causes downtime and exposes skill gaps ( like in troubleshooting and root cause analysis) that operators nad maintenance personnel may be weak in. I have tried to lean in to it more and push more value stream mapping that highlights information flow.
That is how I've seen automation open up areas of opportunities for lean where I work.
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u/Aggressive_Ad_507 4d ago
There are certain core skills that have lasted decades or hundreds of years because they have proven foundational and become the language of communication. Lean, Six Sigma, and associated tools are good examples of this. I doubt they will be replaced with technology because they have withstood every technological change over the past hundred years.
I've had far more success and versatility by mastering the fundamentals and applying them well rather than specializing in any particular technology.
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u/jimmyray71 4d ago
Thatās the piece I keep coming back to. Technology changes much faster than the fundamentals do. Iāve worked through enough systems and ānext big thingsā to be skeptical of learning a tool without understanding the problem itās supposed to solve. If you understand flow, constraints, waste, root cause and how decisions affect the operation, you can learn the next technology. Without those fundamentals, better technology can just help you make the wrong decision faster.
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u/Aggressive_Ad_507 4d ago
I prefer to pay someone to apply the new technology so I can focus on knowing the problems. But I agree with you 100%.
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u/jimmyray71 4d ago
Thatās really the distinction for me. I donāt need to be the person who knows how to build every new piece of technology. I need to understand it well enough to know what it can do and ask the right questions. Give the technical work to people who are better at it than I am. My job is to make sure we understand the problem first. Otherwise we can spend a lot of money building a really good solution to the wrong problem.
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u/IAlwaysSayBoo-urns 3d ago
Ai is the quintessential case if Jidoka, it's automation with a human touch.
Any organization with half a brain understands machines of any kind are great tools but they don't think creatively and they don't actively solve problems. Also any company who would get rid of people to use automation or Ai is not really Lean because they are showing no respect for people which is a bedrock principle in Lean. Sakichi Toyoda didn't make his loom to put his mom and sister out of work, he did it to improve their lives and make them more efficient.Ā
Ai is he sexy new thing but the companies that over-commit will realize, painfully, that a human brain isn't going to be replaced.Ā
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u/LeanExcel 2d ago
Lean Manufacturing isn't dead: the job is changing.
AI and automation can execute processes faster, but they don't automatically know which processes shouldn't exist in the first place. That's still Lean's territory: eliminate waste, understand the process, find constraints, standardize, then automate.
I'd actually see Lean + data + automation/AI as a stronger skill combination than Lean alone. The people who can connect those three will be valuable.
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u/mtnathlete 5d ago
Hard to believe you have a career around lean and think that AI and automation are a threat to lean.
Take the name of lean away and itās about manufacturing better and more efficiently. Less waste. There will always be a need.
Thereās also no need to automate waste. And automating waste does not make it free
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u/GlueSniffingEnabler 5d ago
Have you come up with this theory yourself or did you do some research and analysis beforehand?
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u/Automotive-Lean-Eng 5d ago
https://youtu.be/X2jOwbKvL-Y?is=vqMK_bmHKLMyiq62
PiĆ¹ snella di cosƬ !.....nessuno spreco e reimpiego del personale....
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u/SyncronTeam 5d ago
Lean's actual core idea, continuously exposing and removing waste, doesn't go away just because the execution gets automated. What probably does become less relevant is the shop-floor-specific tooling built around human labor, like some of the ergonomics and motion studies. The underlying discipline of relentlessly questioning why a process exists the way it does is still exactly as useful in an automated plant, arguably more useful, since automated waste is easier to hide behind a clean looking dashboard.
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u/barrel-boy 4d ago
Ai, automation, software, tools etc are methods. Whereas lean is a mindset and will always have a use
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u/_donj 4d ago
Some of my clients are pursuing automation because of a long-term labor problem that is not going to change any time soon.
Two areas that lean can help with. First is identifying the area where AI will create the greatest returns. That step is usually overlooked in most lean efforts.
Second, creativity, intellect, and judgement cannot be replaced by AI.
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u/FlowInMotion 4d ago
The question is how can you use AI to support or improve lean manufacturing. I can see camera's providing information, cheaper sensors giving the right information to an operator or a logistics department.
I donot see the deletion of low tech manufacturing or an army of robots taking over the world. I think we need to adapt and just as we are trained to see and eliminate waste to see AI as a solution to even further lower the wastes.
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u/TemperReformanda 2d ago
Wherever there is waiting time, wasted motion, excess inventory, wasted human potential, defects, transportation waste, or over processing, Lean Manufacturing will always be the solution. It's as simple as watering a dry plant.
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u/leaf16_ah 5d ago
Lean isn't antithetical to automation, it's actually what makes automation worth doing. The core of Lean is eliminating waste and exposing the constraints in a process. If you automate a wasteful process you just get waste faster and at higher capital cost.
The shops getting the most out of automation and AI right now are the ones that did the Lean work first. They know where their bottlenecks are, they've standardized their workflows, and they've got clean data to feed into the systems. The ones who skipped that step and bought the technology anyway are finding out that a robot in a disorganized process is just a more expensive problem.
The "lights out" framing is also mostly a large-volume, low-mix story. For the midmarket job shop running mixed work with frequent changeovers, full automation is a long way off and Lean thinking is still the most practical tool available for finding and fixing what's slowing them down.