Achieving Basic Stability: The Starting Point for Lean Manufacturing

A Management Services magazine article by Art Smalley arguing that many lean efforts stall because operations lack basic stability: predictable manpower, machines, materials, and methods. It recounts Toyota’s own early struggles in the 1950s from retired-executive recollections, gives four diagnostic questions for whether an operation is stable enough to pursue flow, and walks through achieving stability in each of the 4Ms.