More Amazon and Lean

When Marc Onetto arrived at Amazon in 2007, the spirit of lean management was already present. You could say Onetto brought a capital "L" lean to Amazon. He previously worked in supply chain at General Electric (GE). GE was one of the earliest companies to adopt a process known as Six Sigma. A Motorola engineer named Bill Smith developed Six Sigma in 1986. Six Sigma emerged from the American Quality Movement forced upon by Japanese competition, and It was reasonably derived from Shewhart's and Deming's work on variation. Motorola focused on Six Sigma in manufacturing, but Jack Welch, CEO of GE, used Six Sigma as an overall business strategy. Since Wilke worked at Allied Signal (another early adopter), he was already familiar with Six Sigma before Onetto arrived.

You might remember Jack Donaghy's (Alec Baldwin) frequent mention of GE's Six Sigma on 30 Rock the TV show. Like much of Dr. Deming's work, Six Sigma focuses on statistical strategies for improving quality by identifying and eliminating causes of defects and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes. One of the critical aspects of Onetto's capital "L" lean transformation at Amazon was his study under Nakao-san of the Shingijutsu group. Shinigjutsu was created by Taiichi Ohno's "Autonomous Study Group members." Onetto said during the 15 minutes of the Shinigjutsu training; they watched the original automated loom invented by Sakichi Toyoda. They didn't understand the point of the exercise until a thread broke and the loom stopped. As soon as they understood, Nakao-San declared they were ready to move over to the car assembly, as we had understood Jidoka's underlying principle.