Applying lean thinking to data storage

What is lean thinking?

Lean thinking is essentially a way of thinking that works to optimize value while reducing waste and using fewer resources. Lean thinking can be applied as a business management strategy (often referred to as ‘lean management’). It originates from Toyota’s manufacturing practices in the latter half of the 20th century; the progenitor of the concepts that came to be known as lean management was Taiichi Ohno, a Toyota executive who is remembered as the originator of the Toyota Production System (TPS). The TPS is famous for identifying and minimizing sources of waste, maximizing production output, and developing a system that encourages constructive criticism and continuous improvement. 

The TPS consisted of methods and concepts like Just-In-Time Manufacturing, Kaizen, Kanban, and Jidoka. Just-in-time is the practice of matching production precisely to consumer demand and using data analysis to optimize output according to predicted demand. Kaizen is the Japanese word for continuous improvement and is a cornerstone of the TPS, emphasized to ensure that engineers and managers are always examining the production process with an eye to improving efficiency and quality control. All TPS terminology focuses on maximizing efficiency, reducing waste, constantly improving quality, and managing the production process in a precise, detailed fashion. 

Ohno was greatly influenced by American business management consultant and statistician W. Edwards Deming, a man known as the “father of the third wave of the industrial revolution” for his emphasis on data-driven management. Deming had a long and storied career, capped by his tenure as a consultant for the US government. He was tapped by the US Occupation authority in Japan to help high-level executives of the Japanese zaibatsu, the country’s largest and most vertically integrated corporations, restore the Japanese economy after the devastation it suffered over the course of World War II. Deming’s system of Total Quality Control had a profound influence on Ohno, who took Deming’s teachings to even greater extremes and used its principles to develop the methods of the Toyota Production System.

While both Ohno and Deming contributed ideas and best practices to what ultimately became the lean management style, the term was coined by neither. The first use was in the book The Machine That Changed The World, written by James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos. The book, published in 1990, examined the Toyota Production System and coined the term “lean process management” to describe Toyota’s highly effective methods of reducing waste and maximizing output efficiency. 

The lean management philosophy consists primarily of five principles: identifying value, value stream analysis, creating a continuous workflow, creating a pull system, and continuous improvement. Identifying value involves determining what customers value and what the company is producing that the customer wants to buy; anything that does not contribute to adding value for the customer is considered waste. Value stream analysis is the process of systematically and thoroughly analyzing the design and production process, and determining where waste can be eliminated. 

Creating a continuous workflow is all about devising a manufacturing process to function in a continuous, seamless way that maximizes efficiency by reducing interruptions and delays, as opposed to focusing on producing products in batches of a pre-ordained size.  Creating a pull system involves responding to market demands and only producing exactly the amount of product that can be sold, such as just-in-time manufacturing. Continuous improvement, taken from the TPS Kaizen principle, speaks for itself: constantly seeking new ways to streamline production, improve efficiency, and reduce waste.  

Why is being lean important in it?

While lean thinking was conceived of as a manufacturing strategy, the lessons learned from its minimalistic philosophy and customer-centric perspective can be applied to nearly any industry. Indeed, even technology companies that do little to no manufacturing of their own, like Amazon, have employed lean strategies: in Amazon’s case, this entailed applying the Kaizen-style philosophy of constant improvement and leaning on an Andon-inspired chain of command that allowed employees at all levels to signal when a process wasn’t working.

But how can this apply to, say, an IT company that operates data centers or provides managed services?

At a minimum, any business can learn lessons from the lean philosophy about reducing waste. In IT, this might mean reducing redundancies — especially in data. In the case of industrial data services provider HighByte and one of their customers, an auto parts manufacturer, this discipline took the form of providing a value analysis regarding the data that HighByte was helping their customers gather. By narrowing the scope of data collection and employing cutting-edge data management services like PowerBI, HighByte was able to help their customer sort the wheat from the chaff+ 32 and collect the data that mattered quickly, while excluding unnecessary or unhelpful data from the process.

At a higher level, many IT and data companies could stand to learn lessons from lean management. The value in these lessons is not always about finding efficiencies and minimizing internal waste, but perhaps more so about applying lean principles to the delivery of solutions for customers. The emphasis on providing scalability in the industry mirrors Just-In-Time manufacturing: being able to provide additional capacity as customers demand it may involve violating lean principles by ensuring an excess supply of compute and storage; conversely, having systems in place that allow customers to scale their own systems on-demand may help them meet their own internal lean goals.

How can lean principles be implemented in IT infrastructure?

In order to reap the benefits of lean management, it’s vital to employ leaders who understand the principles and can help implement them. Advanced business credentials like the Kettering University lean management degree program are a great sign of a potential leader who can help you execute your vision smoothly and effectively.

Introducing the correct tools for management is another important step. Many tools are available to help implement lean principles like the Kanban workflow, including Atlassian’s popular Trello application. Kanban tools can be applied to virtually any team’s workflow to help management delegate and maintain oversight of tasks at a sufficiently granular level without micromanaging or constantly wasting their employees’ time by calling meetings or demanding progress updates.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, effectively implementing lean principles is about ensuring that the entire chain of command has a scope-appropriate understanding of lean principles and how they apply to their area of contribution, entry-level employees don’t need to read Taiichi Ohno’s memoirs, but sales managers should absolutely be aware of the basic lean framework, and help their direct reports apply those principles by helping customers understand how a high-quality service provider focused on providing value, attending to their needs, and providing the flexibility they need, can help them meet their goals.