Farms and Manufacturing Systems
Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, we traded “Black Friday” for “Farming Saturday”. My son and I went up to West Lafayette to enjoy a Boilermaker men’s basketball victory and then got to do our first annual “farm day” with the Troyers.
At Mackey arena at halftime.
I got to drive and unload into the grain wagon! Woo-hoo!
As we were traveling through central Indiana farm land, it hit me…How much a farmstead is like current manufacturing systems!
Check out all the buildings on this property!!
Farmsteads like this are a lot like our manufacturing systems.
- They grow to serve the purposes for the given time.
- You get a little budget/money and you build a system/building – “we needed it!”
- After decades of use, no one remembers why we built that building/system in the first place.
- There is probably some efficiency in consolidating and re-building.
- Because you have and use the buildings/systems, it is hard to make the decision to change from the status quo.
Observations: There are very few farmsteads (or manufacturing operations) that are operating at full efficiency. We just keep building and doing, without stopping to ask, “is this going to improve my business/farm in the long term? All of these systems/buildings require care and feeding. Is this the best use of our efforts around the plant or the farm?
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Great analogy!
My favorite: no one remembers why we built that building/system in the first place.
…yet people may continue to pile up stuff/information into the building/system for no reason other than it’s there and we’ve always done that.
Taking a step back and looking at the whole system is not an easy task, and sometimes requires sacrificing working on other things that may be important to get done at the time.
I should really take that last sentence to heart myself.
BTW…I haven’t been to your site in a while. New look is great!
One other thought…there’s the other kind of building I’ve experienced recently. The one where somebody spent lots of money on an overly complex building that no one quite understood the purpose of and really didn’t want to use…then you get hired to build a significantly less expensive building that actually meets people’s needs and adds value!