If the people working in America’s factories had to live up to the same standards as journalists, there would be no more newspapers for the simple fact that there would not be a single operable printing press in America; nor would there be a single automobile that would start up; we would all walk around naked because the seams on our clothes would come apart at first wear; and we would be very, very hungry.
If one of your employees presented you with a supply chain study of the caliber printed in Knight-Ridder newspapers across the land on military purchasing, you would fire them on the spot – no severance pay, no time to clean out their desk – you would just take them by the scruff of the neck and hurl them out into the parking lot.
These products of America’s fine journalism schools – a Ms. Lauren Markoe and Mr. Seth Borenstein – wasted an inexcusable amount of perfectly good ink demonstrating just how pathetic journalism is these days. The story, "Pentagon Program Costing Taxpayers Millions In Inflated Prices", concludes that supply chain strategies that reduce the number of vendor, tiering smaller or less capable suppliers under the larger ones, bundling product and service packages, and so forth is an utter waste of money.
These two keen, analytical minds sneer "It’s the equivalent of shopping for weekly groceries at a convenience store." To arrive at this conclusion, they took a sample of a little less than .0001% of military spending under the program over the past several years, found some prices through the Tier 1’s that were higher than the prices offered directly by the Tier 2 and 3 guys and there you have it. They saw no need to look at inventories or associated handling costs, lead time or cycle time analysis, the administrative costs, or much of anything else. All of that entailed a little too much work, I guess. No, all they needed was a quote or two from a disgruntled supplier who got whacked down to Tier 2 and cannot sell directly to the military and they had their sad story. Of course, they easily found a liberal Democrat Congressman to agree that supplier consolidation strategies are wasteful, as well.
While their sample size was so small as to render the data meaningless, they had no input from competent supply chain experts, and they ignored most of the economics of what is at heart an economic issue, they should be given full credit for using proper grammar and writing in complete sentences. There were no dangling prepositions that I saw. So the article was not completely without merit.
In fact, lean manufacturing can be accurately described as "the equivalent of shopping for weekly groceries at a convenience store" and then hammering that convenience store relentlessly to continuously improve prices and service. Markoe and Borenstein could not see lean principles and practices when they were staring them right in the face. Their first clue should have been the quotes buried deep in the story in which the customers of the military procurement strategy said they love the selection and service they get from the Tier 1’s. Also near the end, the article acknowledges that this is being done throughout the private sector. This should have been another clue. The private sector tends to frown on wasting money on a grand scale and does not usually pursue strategies that result in such squandering, so perhaps there was something to it that Markoe and Borenstein were missing.
Ms. Markoe’s qualifications for slamming lean supply chain thinking is a little hard to discern. She seems to have devoted the bulk of her journalistic efforts to getting at all the facts involved in Strom Thurmond’s illegitimate daughter, and pointing out that racism still exists in some parts of the South. I guess her primary qualification for belittling the Pentagon’s lean efforts on the front page of the paper is that she really, really, really cares about stuff. Mr. Borenstein is the Knight-Ridder reporter on NASA and the environment. Since NASA uses a lot of numbers and this study has a lot of numbers, well, he is an expert. Oh, and he really, really, really cares about whales and other stuff, too.
In fact, the military has been doing a great job in the lean area, They are such a bureaucratic behemoth, the effort is akin to turning battleship around in a river, but they are getting there. I compare the intellectual lightweights at Knight-Ridder to a fellow by the name of Mark Roberts, with whom I have corresponded over the last few weeks. Mark works at Camp Victory South, CENTCOM, Operation Iraqi Freedom – yeah, Baghdad – and is in charge of lean implementation efforts in the document management area. You got it. Right there in the middle of the War the Army is implementing lean. He tracked me down in his relentless pursuit of information.
I have no idea how many newspapers put this ridiculous criticism of the military and lean principles on their front page – dozens, I am sure. My support remains with the Pentagon. Their leadership of change and developing American manufacturing and logistical capabilities has been instrumental in making this country what it is. Ironically, one result of the Pentagon’s track record of preserving our liberty is that they have also preserved the opportunity for imbeciles to get jobs working for newspapers.
The downside of Freedom of the Press is that people whose defining personal traits are (1) arrogance; (2) ignorance, and (3) a decidedly liberal bias too often get their hands on printing presses. To paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke, giving ink to ignorant liberals is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
Kathleen Fasanella says
Following a link from Lean Manufacuring Blog, I landed at this diatribe entitled “Jobs for Dummies” and frankly, I have never been more stunned by such unprofessional, reactionary partisanship in this milieu. I certainly won’t be recommending this blog as a worthwhile visit to my readers. Were this author to have had any intellectual integrity whatsoever, this posting would not have descended into liberal bashing. If I wanted to read a reactionary right-wing political tirade, I’d visit Bubba.com. According to this logic, we have the conservatives of the world to thank for any form of human progression. As it is, I found very little of value to recommend this site; any material links end up at the for-profit site -and with the aforementioned invective- leading me to question the value of anything this company has to offer. In sum, if the content of this argument bore the compelling weight of cogent argument, one need not have descended into gratuitous partisan slamming. This post was very unprofessional.
Perhaps someone should remind Bill of two things; lean is not mean and Deming was a “liberal”.
Bill Waddell says
My dear Ms. Fasanella,
Writers such as those I assailed deserve no consideration or serious response. Through their gross ignorance of lean principles, they thought they had come up with evidence to support their blatantly anti-military bias. They were dead wrong. I don’t take kindly to slandering either lean or the military.
As far as you opting to exclude Superfactory from the list of sites you recommend, I found that your site says the following:
“Social activism is a defining paradigm of my life and that should be no surprise to any of you (who have read me). … I am committed to an ecologically low-impact lifestyle; I’m a vegetarian (that means no meat of any kind for those who don’t know) and consciously limit my lifestyle and spending towards choices that reflect my values. In simplest terms that means I’ll never own an SUV, a large screen TV (actually, I don’t watch TV at all but I’m a life-long NPR listener and supporter), or any of these sorts of things.”
I don’t think there was much chance of you giving this or any manufacturing site much of a plug. Superfactory tends to be read by people who not only buy SUV’s, big screen TV’s and beef jerky – they make the stuff. In fact they have dedicated their careers to making it more and better and trying to get a big screen TV, an SUV and a big ol’ mess of beef jerky into every home.
So we will have to agree to disagree.
Kathleen Fasanella says
If you’d spent any time on my site (beyond a keyword search for “liberal”) you’d see that not only do I give plenty of manufacturing sites a plug, mine IS a manufacturing site with no fewer than 300-400 unique visitors a day. It is in spite of my personal lifestyle choices that I run a blog on manufacturing and based on 24 years of factory floor experience, the two are not incompatible. Japanese leaders of lean have always led similar spartan lifestyles. It is not incompatible to “live lean”. Arguably, the latter demonstrates integrity.
I reiterate, if you had sufficient cogent argument to back you up, you didn’t need to digress into partisan slamming. It is very unprofessional and causes me to question the value of anything you’re selling. You do your business a disservice. You do the topic of Lean a disservice as well. Lean is not a new cash-cow program for management consultants looking to expand their customer base.
Deming is spinning in his grave.
Bill Waddell says
While Deming may or may not have been a political liberal, I hope you are not suggesting that he used invalid statistical methods to advance his personal agenda. That is precisely what these reporters have done.
I think if anything were to send the dear departed Dr. Deming spinning it would be concluding that lean principles are bad economics and that the military procurement strategy is wasteful on the basis of a .0001% sample size – then printing that conclusion on the front page of newspapers from coast to coast.
Have you no criticism for the reporters who would trash lean and the United States military on the basis of junk statistics and shoddy reporting? Or do the ends justify their means, hence you only have criticism of me?
Kathleen Fasanella says
I’ve written posts that were highly critical of leaders in my field but there were several differences between the flavor of my posts and yours. One, I did not demean myself by using germane comparatives or stereotypical depictions regarding the object of my outrage. As their own words are enough to condemn them, I merely deconstruct arguments strand by strand.
Second, I have sufficient respect for my readers to interpret information for themselves that I provided a direct link so they could read the original material in its entirety -in the event that I’d taken anything out of context.
Third -returning to germane comparatives- I think one solidifies their own position by taking the high road. While I find some of the material in question to be similarly offensive, I’m not going to write something that would make me seem just as unprofessional -in comparison- as they were. I reiterate that a cogent, logical, line by line deconstruction of what they wrote would have made you look much better. If your argument bears weight, you don’t need to rely on inciteful superlatives. You should have been better than they were.
Bill Waddell says
Ms. Fasanella, I respect your opinion but I do not think you really read my piece very carefully. At the very least, you should be aware of the fact that I write for an audience of technical manufacturing professionals.
When I wrote “they took a sample of a little less than .0001% of military spending under the program over the past several years”, to manufacturing folks, that spoke volumes. The Superfactory readers are well versed in lot sampling theory and they do not need me to give them a primer on how invalid data are when based on such a sample. I did not go into a detailed deconstruction because the manufactuing sector knows by that simple statement alone that the article was based on invalid data. Perhaps you failed to grasp that point.
I also wrote on the assumption that the Superfactory audience is quite well versed in lean supply chain management theory and that it took nothing more than me stating “The story, ‘Pentagon Program Costing Taxpayers Millions In Inflated Prices’, concludes that supply chain strategies that reduce the number of vendor, tiering smaller or less capable suppliers under the larger ones, bundling product and service packages, and so forth is an utter waste of money.” to establish the sheer lunacy of the Knight-Ridder article. To serious manufacturing professionals, that is the same as an assertion that the world is flat. It neded no deconstruction – it was absurd on its face – at least to the lean manufacturing community.
Certainly had I been writing for a broader audience, it would have been necessary for me to explain statistical sampling and the fallacy of the reporters’ methods; and to explain the economic benefits of supply chain streamlining strategies. But Superfactory is not that broader audience – the common denominator among the Superfactory readers is a serious interest in lean manufacturing. I think maybe there were some nuances in my blog that were quite clear to the bulk of the Superfactory audience, but a bit vague to you.
Finally, I continue to be dismayed at the energy with which you come after me, but your utter failure to even comment on the crux of my blog. If you think the Knight-Ridder story had statistical, economical merit, then you should explain that to the Superfactory readers. If not, you should conceed that Knight-Ridder putting blatantly false information in the newspapers for millions to read is a far greater sin than me writing about “giving whiskey and car keys to tenage boys”, rather than write in some Harvard Debating Society format in Superfactory.
Mark Graban says
I think it was Ms. Fasanella’s comments that were personal, unprofessional, and out of line.