VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [65]
“A couple of reasons,” said Amy. “I haven’t been able to stop by lately, and I just wanted to see how things were going. But, um, this is not just a casual visit. I had a meeting with Elaine earlier this morning, and she was very alarmed about the growth of inventories over the past six months. And now that I’m here – I can see why. Wayne, what’s with all this inventory?”
Wayne in fact began to turn slightly red.
“Well … ! The best I can say is that we’re working on it. I can assure you that’s not intentional and that it is temporary. In a couple of months at the most we should have the whole thing sorted out.”
“But what is the cause? I thought Lean was supposed to reduce work-in-process inventory.”
“It is supposed to reduce the WIP, but … there are some things we haven’t quite sorted out yet.”
“Such as … ?”
“This is kind of a delicate topic,” said Wayne, “but one of the causes seems to be the WING system that we’re mandated to use by Corporate. Based on what my lead Black Belt, Kurt, has been able to learn talking to some of the production people, whenever WING detects that a machine is idle and waiting for something to produce, it triggers a build order, usually for a stock item that can go to the warehouse.”
“WING just does this automatically?”
“Yes.”
“You mean, it’s like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice? You turn it on and you can’t get it to stop?”
“Pretty much.”
“There’s no manual override? No off button?” she asked.
“Yes, there are work-arounds, but it’s like the software has a mind of its own. It is very determined to keep every resource working one hundred percent of the time.”
“Well, wait a minute, I thought Lean Six Sigma was supposed to do that too – you know, what you just said a few minutes ago. Everyone is busy all day, working to takt time.”
“The trouble is that WING triggers the build order with only a very loose correlation to customer demand. The assumptions in the software are based on the old ‘push’ model.”
“Yes, I’m familiar with push – the assumption that ‘if we build it, it will sell,’ ” said Amy.
“As I’m sure I’ve explained to you, Lean is based on the opposite. It’s based on a ‘pull’ model. Nothing is built until and unless a customer wants it. Or, on a practical level, only so much is built to fill the channel on a timely basis. So WING3.2 is actually at odds with Lean principles. It’s a constant battle.”
“You can’t just pull the plug?” asked Amy.
“Well, no, but what we’re going to do is implement a newer version of WING, called WING4-L, which incorporates a number of Lean principles. In the meantime, we’re doing a lot of manual entry, which breeds mistakes, and incomplete entries, and all kinds of problems. But, well, it’s politically a little sensitive. WING is enthusiastically supported by Peter Winn, who just loves the ability to drill down through the data, and find out what’s going on.”
“And make sure every Winner employee is working at a hundred percent,” Amy said. “So what’s the solution?”
“We’ve already installed some Lean software plug-ins that should cancel out most of the push effects of WING3.2,” said Wayne. “But for some reason WING is overriding the overrides. The programmers tell me that there must be some very powerful subroutines buried deep in the code, and that what Hi-T is using is not a standard version of WING3.2. It’s been modified.”
A realization broke onto Amy’s face.
“The Random Tornado strikes again,” she said.
“What?”
“Randal Tourandos. My predecessor. He was forever fiddling with the WING code. Yes, that would make sense. Because his goal was to maximize the productivity metrics. That’s probably how he got his seventeen percent one-year gain – and, come to think of it, why my salespeople had to do so much discounting on stock inventory the following year.”
“Can you call him?” asked Wayne. “Can you ask him where he buried all the build triggers in the code?”
“No, I can’t call him. But maybe I can ask one of the Microbursts – his IT staff. A few of them are still around.”
“That could be very