M4E #41: Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking
Today’s video doesn’t come from the manufacturing world as Vy Alechnavicius has a Youtube channel dedicated to UX and design (vaexperience). He does a good job in the following video to summarise and explain the concepts of Agile, Lean (more focused on the tech world) and Design Thinking, a concept we briefly introduced last week in M4E #40. The idea of today’s post is to give some initial ideas to discuss these concepts applied to manufacturing in the chat, specially when regarding Agile application in the manufacturing world!
Time for Insights
Just wanted to clarify a point from this video so you all remember it well: applying Lean achieves optimized and well-oiled processes as Vy says, but the main idea behind it is to keep the tasks that add value to our customer and remove those that don’t (waste).
Agile has its origin in the software world, although greatly inspired by Lean Manufacturing. In latest years the cycle has been closed in some companies, that also took some concepts from the Agile software world to manufacturing, creating the concept of Agile Manufacturing. For example, this concept is behind the idea of the Three-Day Car.
Design Thinking is a methodology that can be applied for complex problem solving with a defined set of steps (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Implement). Thus, it can also be applied in manufacturing. You can read here a brief explanation of BMW applying this methodology to solve problems in their industrial processes, creating as a result the Visense startup.