How I came to find the “best example of LEAN 3P”
I was on an American Airlines flight heading to Washington DC to work on a Lean Six Sigma certification course for a company called CoStar. The following week I was to be engaged in a LEAN 3P process event with a missile defense company called Aerojet Rocketdyne. Why are these details important, read on and I’ll tell you…
I was working on a LEAN 3P Event Guide
While on the flight I was working on the curriculum that I was going to use for the LEAN 3P event. It was mostly complete. The curriculum was a “how-to” guide that the students could use to run 3P events in the future once we complete the initial event.
I was stuck on an uncomplicated way to explain 3P. I needed to clear my head because I had been thinking about this for too long.
The movie “The Founder”
I put on my headphones and plugged them into the back of the small tablet attached to the back of the seat in front of me. I then scrolled through the list of American Airlines’ free in-flight movies. Nothing looked interesting. I settled on a movie called “The Founder”. It was a movie about Ray Crock and the story behind the creation of McDonald’s. I thought “if it’s not good, it will at least be background noise to help me sleep”.
Ray Crock and his relationship with LEAN
Fate was smiling down on me that afternoon. I was extremely interested in this movie because as an entrepreneur, I related to Ray Crock. The story of the founding of McDonald’s is full of lessons for a business owner. But that wasn’t the reason fate was smiling at me…
In the movie, Ray met the original founders of McDonald’s, Dick and Mac McDonald in San Bernardino, California in 1954. He was enthralled by this small burger joint because of the speed at that they could produce a burger, fries, and a soda. It took less than a minute. He was used to a 20–30-minute wait at other restaurants.
Mcdonald’s was designed using LEAN 3P
The McDonald brothers go out to dinner with Ray and explain the history of Mcdonald’s. This is where fate smiled down on me. During this conversation, they explained how they designed their restaurant. Using chalk, a tennis court as a template, and employees, drew a mock-up of the kitchen on the tennis court. They then went through several scenarios creating imaginary hamburgers, fries, shakes, and cokes from raw material to finished product in a bag given to the customer.
When I watched the McDonald’s brothers with their employees acting out multiple scenarios on the chalk mock-up, they had drawn on the tennis court, I thought “this has to be the best example of LEAN 3P that I have ever seen”.
Watch this YouTube clip about the conversation between Ray Croc and the McDonald’s brothers. It is the scene where the McDonald’s brothers and their employees are on a tennis court acting out multiple scenarios on a chalk drawing mock-up of the McDonald’s kitchen.
“The LEAN 3P Advantage”
Allan Coletta, who is the author of a new book titled “The Lean 3P Advantage: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Production Preparation Process” said in an interview that “Lean 3P (Production Preparation Process) is a LEAN event-driven process for developing a new product concurrently with the people that will produce it.” That is exactly what the McDonald’s brothers were doing with the mock-up. With the help of their employees, they designed and re-designed a kitchen in a cost-effective environment until they had a proven design with the most effective flow.
Do you have any examples of simple but effective ways to describe LEAN 3P? If you do, please share below, and help other LEAN teachers and mentors.
