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Take a look at this Toyota process map: https://creately.com/diagram/example/hoz4qrcl1/toyota-process-map https://creately.com/diagram/example/hoz4qrcl1/toyota-

Take a look at this Toyota process map: https://creately.com/diagram/example/hoz4qrcl1/toyota-process-map https://creately.com/diagram/example/hoz4qrcl1/toyota-proces... There are checks everywhere. Pre-checks at the beginning of the supply process, checks that the supplies are valid, checks during manufacturing, checks during assembly, checks post-production. The value chain must continue to flow freely and continuously, and any bottleneck must be found and dealt with immediately, anywhere in the flow. During the entire lifecycle of producing the car, there are gates for both quality and waste. You can't get quality if you have waste, because waste leads to defects, which you have to fix, which takes more time and money, and exponentially destroys your productivity & product. Process gates are necessary to eliminate waste and increase quality. You have to immediately fix the things the gates catch, and continuously improve the process of fixing them, until identifying and fixing problems becomes fast and natural. So process gates are a good thing - IF you actually follow Lean, and are actively working to improve your process. Most people know jack shit about Lean because the company didn't give a shit about training their employees, so their employees suck, and don't improve the process. Toyota, however, does train their employees, and so the employees follow this process, and the result are the most reliable cars at competitive prices. If you are resolved to just have shitty people and not train them, then sure you can remove process gates. And you will churn out cars faster. But those cars will be shitty, just like American cars from the 50s-90s. You'll need to spend a lot more to fix all the defects, and customers will be unhappy. If that's fine with you, cool! You're pushing out cars! Progress! But let's not pretend process gates are evil just because we don't want to learn to use them properly.

partdavid 4y ago
"Checks" and process gates aren't at all synonymous, though. A process that contains appropriate checks isn't what the author is talking about; I think that's clear enough from the examples, but maybe it's not.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  Many of those checks are gates. They will stop the production line when they find a defect, because they know it's a defect that can reoccur, and won't let a car go out with defects. They fix issues on the spot, and immediately incorporate the fixes into the production process. Of course besides gates (Andon cord, kanban) they have other processes: autonomation, poka-yoke, production leveling, kaizen, 6S, etc. But gates keep production in check, and must be efficient, and part of a continuous improvement cycle.
JTbane 4y ago
Yep, Toyota has a pretty amazing manufacturing processes, and as a result their cars are some of the most reliable. If you don't have process gates, your end result probably sells more due to marketing and hype (looking at you, Ford and GM muscle cars and pickups).
hbrn 4y ago
One of the deadly sins of management is treating software engineers as factory workers. Toyota ships same cars over and over. You can't copy the output of a factory worker, but you can copy the output of a software engineer. Even if you ship CRUDs all day long, it's still very different from a factory worker.
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
  And one of the deadly sins of software development is pretending that we can't learn new things from other industries.
  - avmich 4y ago
    For this specific context, disagree.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
      OK. I'd say that it depends on what is meant by "treating software engineers as factory workers." Elsewhere in the thread I reference Team Software Process (TSP) which is a development methodology that uses feedback to continuously improve the development process in a way that's very similar to manufacturing methods. I've done it; it works.
      - hbrn 4y ago
        This is a strawman argument, nobody here advocates against feedback. And using feedback to improve process is not specific to any industry. You don't need to learn from Toyota to understand that feedback is valuable.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  > Toyota ships same cars over and over. Well, no, they don't, and this is the point: they are constantly refining every car model. They are always fixing bugs in the active production line, working on new features, and every year ship new "major and minor versions" of each model. Toyota USA ships these models: Corolla, Camry, Avalon, Mirai, GR86, Supra, Sienna, Tacoma, Tundra, Sequoia, Highlander, Venza, C-HR, RAV4, Corolla Cross, 4Runner, bZ4X. For each of those there are 2-6 different trims. Assuming an average of 4 trims, that is 2,380 different configurations of vehicles. Each trim can also have optional components added or removed to customize each vehicle, increasing combinations further. A US Toyota factory worker may support tens of thousands of ways to assemble a car, and those ways change every day. > Even if you ship CRUDs all day long, it's still very different from a factory worker. Sure, but even a factory worker is different from a factory worker. The demands are different, the customers, compliance, tolerances. You can't treat them all the same. But some basic principles of managing companies, people, work, etc, can be applied to all of them. Waste is bad. Quality is good. Stopping to fix something once is better than stopping to fix it 20 times. The impact of a factory issue is often much greater, more expensive, and harder to fix, than that of a software issue. But software workers can learn a lot about quality and efficiency from how well-run factories are managed. That idea gave birth to Lean Software Development (a subset of Agile).
DeathArrow 4y ago
Software programs are not physical goods nor do they always work the same, by letting workers apply the same algorithms. Programmers are not workers sitting on the belt and assembling the same software over and over, they are creative persons who have to take lots of decisions.

partdavid 4y ago

"Checks" and process gates aren't at all synonymous, though. A process that contains appropriate checks isn't what the author is talking about; I think that's clear enough from the examples, but maybe it's not.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago
Many of those checks are gates. They will stop the production line when they find a defect, because they know it's a defect that can reoccur, and won't let a car go out with defects. They fix issues on the spot, and immediately incorporate the fixes into the production process. Of course besides gates (Andon cord, kanban) they have other processes: autonomation, poka-yoke, production leveling, kaizen, 6S, etc. But gates keep production in check, and must be efficient, and part of a continuous improvement cycle.

JTbane 4y ago

Yep, Toyota has a pretty amazing manufacturing processes, and as a result their cars are some of the most reliable. If you don't have process gates, your end result probably sells more due to marketing and hype (looking at you, Ford and GM muscle cars and pickups).

hbrn 4y ago

One of the deadly sins of management is treating software engineers as factory workers. Toyota ships same cars over and over. You can't copy the output of a factory worker, but you can copy the output of a software engineer. Even if you ship CRUDs all day long, it's still very different from a factory worker.

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
And one of the deadly sins of software development is pretending that we can't learn new things from other industries.
- avmich 4y ago
  For this specific context, disagree.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
    OK. I'd say that it depends on what is meant by "treating software engineers as factory workers." Elsewhere in the thread I reference Team Software Process (TSP) which is a development methodology that uses feedback to continuously improve the development process in a way that's very similar to manufacturing methods. I've done it; it works.
    - hbrn 4y ago
      This is a strawman argument, nobody here advocates against feedback. And using feedback to improve process is not specific to any industry. You don't need to learn from Toyota to understand that feedback is valuable.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
> Toyota ships same cars over and over. Well, no, they don't, and this is the point: they are constantly refining every car model. They are always fixing bugs in the active production line, working on new features, and every year ship new "major and minor versions" of each model. Toyota USA ships these models: Corolla, Camry, Avalon, Mirai, GR86, Supra, Sienna, Tacoma, Tundra, Sequoia, Highlander, Venza, C-HR, RAV4, Corolla Cross, 4Runner, bZ4X. For each of those there are 2-6 different trims. Assuming an average of 4 trims, that is 2,380 different configurations of vehicles. Each trim can also have optional components added or removed to customize each vehicle, increasing combinations further. A US Toyota factory worker may support tens of thousands of ways to assemble a car, and those ways change every day. > Even if you ship CRUDs all day long, it's still very different from a factory worker. Sure, but even a factory worker is different from a factory worker. The demands are different, the customers, compliance, tolerances. You can't treat them all the same. But some basic principles of managing companies, people, work, etc, can be applied to all of them. Waste is bad. Quality is good. Stopping to fix something once is better than stopping to fix it 20 times. The impact of a factory issue is often much greater, more expensive, and harder to fix, than that of a software issue. But software workers can learn a lot about quality and efficiency from how well-run factories are managed. That idea gave birth to Lean Software Development (a subset of Agile).

DeathArrow 4y ago

Software programs are not physical goods nor do they always work the same, by letting workers apply the same algorithms. Programmers are not workers sitting on the belt and assembling the same software over and over, they are creative persons who have to take lots of decisions.