That's the problem with LEAN. It becomes 'for its own sake' and exists as nice graphs on a board.
Sorry Dave, I can't agree with this part of your view.
During the days of the old DTI program of factory visits I was fortunate enough to observe a few excellent UK factories.
Ideal Boilers in Hull had made massive savings in site costs by eliminating whole warehouses as they did not need to stock pile rolls of steel and castings. The 'Milkman' came twice daily to fill up the production line boxes of nuts & bolts etc. Like Morgan they now only needed to make boilers with firm orders rather than stock piling models to suit production. Less Warehousing and lower Capital Employed.
http://idealheating.com/videos/logicplus-video.phpKab Seating in Northampton was another example of a company making 'Bespoke Seats' for Truck & Bus Drivers. They also had their cut steel components supplied Just in Time rather than store masses of steel rolls and need to cut their own.
http://www.kabseating.com/Even in Clothing manufacture we were able to use similar techniques to reduce Work in Process and the capital Employed from 7 weeks to 3, making what was selling rather than filling the warehouse with slow movers. Most of the Charts and Diagrams were part of a Team Driven Quality System and Continuous Improvement Initiative.
In all of these initiatives there are Capital Equipment penalties as for the process to work well, JIT manufacturing usually uses small teams to assemble a complete product or section of a product of any model in the range as the order book demands. So instead of one long line making stock products, multiple smaller 'Teams' make what is required. It is a very empowering process for the teams.
Given a free rein, I imagine that there are plenty of 'JIT' opportunities within MMC available to make improvements, without 'throwing out the baby', if they choose to design them into the processes and use them.
It is not without its risks. In Clothing, we had to stop normal production for a couple of weeks and produce 'Clearance Shop Lines' just to get the WIP out of the system for JIT to start. Then the pressure went on Procurement, Sales, Distribution and us Management to keep the orders flowing.
