Augmented Lean: A Human-Centric Framework for Managing Frontline Operations is the book that gets the people-dimension right in the transition to smart manufacturing—what some call Industry 4.0. It’s the critical lynchpin for success, scale, and speed.The book narrates an ongoing industrial revolution by retracing the steps currently being taken by software engineers to join industrial process engineers and operators to foster a renaissance in manufacturing. It is this renaissance which, in turn, lets shopfloor workers at the frontlines (in factories, along the supply chain, in physical retail, and remotely) interact with real-time information that improves their productivity and happiness. The Frontline Worker threads the next natural evolution of Lean management in the digital age, a message that has gotten lost in all the automation-speak.
Workers will complement machines. Despite popular hype about robotics--important but not the whole story--workers are not all going away for the foreseeable future. Augmenting, not replacing workers, is an antidote to the current workforce skills gap and tremendous worry that mindless automation technology creates across society. Properly rolled out using this guidebook, frontline worker augmentation is poised to reshape the contemporary worker and empower frontline workers to regain dignity and create a billion good jobs in the next decade. However, the communication challenge is tremendous: it's not going to be enough to convince engineering students at MIT that manufacturing is exciting, the message needs to reach the masses.
There's a method behind adapting to and profiting from change. Augmentation is not just a message; it is a methodology. How to augment? When to augment? Which tools to use? How to scale it companywide? How to fit into a small-and medium enterprise? How to pilot and deploy in a corporation or in a regulated industry? How to track progress? How does this new wave of technology impact traditional Lean methods (which are already considered tricky to get right)? Even though technology gets easier and faster to implement with each generation, at the organizational level, you need a playbook. At the process level and among mid-level managers you need exposure to the right use-cases to make your own experiences of success and failure. There's also a great need to exchange good practices. Augmented Lean will provide you with all of this.
NATAN LINDER, PHD, is Co-founder and CEO of the frontline operations platform Tulip, and the Co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Formlabs, a pioneer in professional desktop 3D printing. He received his doctorate from MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group.
TROND ARNE UNDHEIM, PHD, is a futurist, podcaster, venture partner, Co-founder of Yegii, and formerly with MIT, WPP, Oracle, and the EU. He received his doctorate in the Future of Work and Artificial Intelligence from the NTNU’s Faculty of Social and Educational Sciences.
List of Figures and Interviews xiii
List of Tables xix
Acknowledgments xxi
About The Authors xxiii
Introduction 1
Who Are the Frontline Workers? 3
What Is Augmented Lean? 8
How Is This Book Organized? 12
Part I The Evolution of Industrial Lean 21
Chapter 1 The Evolution of Frontline Industrial Work 23
Industrial Frontline Workers and Technological Revolutions 26
Industrial Revolutions Through History to the Future 30
Conclusion 49
Chapter 2 From Classic Lean via Agile to Digital Lean and Beyond 53
What Is Digital Lean? 56
Beyond Digital Lean: How Industrial No-Code Empowers Operators 58
Beyond Point Solutions 63
The Emergence of Frontline Operations 68
Conclusion 72
Chapter 3 The State of Play in Industrial Software 77
An Outlier Reshaping the Industry 81
The Advent of 3D Computer-Aided Design 85
The Emergence of Manufacturing Execution Systems 88
Conclusion 95
Chapter 4 The Journey Past Digital Lean 99
DMG MORI’s Integration with Tulip 101
A Digital Boost to Medical Manufacturing: Another Journey 109
Conclusion 114
Part II The Coming of Augmented Lean 117
Chapter 5 The Augmented Lean Framework 119
Classic Lean vs. Digital Lean vs. Augmented Lean 121
Core Principles of Augmented Lean 123
Conclusion 141
Chapter 6 How to Roll Out Industrial Technology the Right Way 145
The Global Lighthouse Network: Top-Down Synthesized Best Practices 148
Four Distinct Ways to Digitally Transform an Industrial Organization 163
Conclusion 174
Chapter 7 Democratizing Operational Technology Using the Dynamic Capabilities of the Organization 179
No-Code and Low-Code 181
Leveraging Organizational Capabilities 188
Conclusion 197
Part III Engineering, Tech, And Skills 201
Chapter 8 The Emergence of the Digitally Literate Industrial Engineer 203
The Evolution of the Industrial Engineering Field 205
Engineering: The Hybrid of Science, Tech, and Innovation 211
The Slow Evolution of Contemporary Industrial Engineering 213
The Need to Ramp Up Change 215
Conclusion 222
Chapter 9 Training the Process Engineers of the Future 227
The Process Engineer: Today and Tomorrow 230
How to Avoid Training the Workforce for Yesterday’s Challenges 232
Reimagining Training 240
Open-Source Manufacturing 241
What Workforce Training Enables an Engineering Mindset? 246
Conclusion 250
Chapter 10 From Automation to Augmentation 255
The State of Play in Industrial Robotics 258
Where Robotics Is Making an Impact on the Factory Floor 264
Automation Is More Than Robotics 267
What Automation Has Accomplished 269
What Augmentation Is and What It Will Become 270
Conclusion 274
Part IV Augmented Lean Operations 279
Chapter 11 The Potential Augmenting Power of Operational Data 281
From Augmented Reality Experiments at MIT to Frontline Operations Platform 285
The Promise of Machine Monitoring 288
There’s Lots of Big Data in Manufacturing, But Can We Use It? 290
Machine Learning in Manufacturing 293
Case Study: The Impact of Operational Data in Data in Life Science Operations 295
Conclusion 304
Chapter 12 Facilitation Over Control: How the Industrial Systems of the Future Might Emerge 309
Why Does Space Manufacturing Suddenly Make Sense? 311
The Size and Shape of the Future Industrial Pie 316
How Long Will It Take for Industry 4.0 to Mature? 320
The Future of Industrial Operations 321
The Workforce Questions 328
Building a Movement 330
Conclusion 332
Chapter 13 Reconfiguring Global Supply Chains 337
Boosting J&J’s Digital Supply Chain with Augmented Lean Approaches 341
Digital Ordering Process in the UK’s Largest Flower Business 345
Building and Trusting in Supply Chain Resilience 349
The Resilience of Global Supply Chains 351
The Lessons from Digitizing GE 353
Remaining Challenges: Tackling Port Congestion 355
The Future of Supply Chains 357
Conclusion 360
Chapter 14 Conclusion: Augmented Lean Management of the Emerging, Frontline Industrial Workforce 365
Augmented Lean Management for the Frontline Workforce 367
Building the Augmented Lean Community 372
Index 375
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