What does Clarence Saunders have to do with Lean Production?
Piggly Wiggly
Let me stop you before you begin scanning through all your Toyota and Lean books. Entrepreneur Clarence Saunders lived in the early 20th century. No, he didn't build cars. His business was grocery stores. He invented the first self-serve retailing model. Saunders' ideas had a profound impact on the development of modern supermarkets and modern supply chains. Saunders spent most of his life developing completely automated stores, including Piggly Wiggly, Keedoozle, and Foodelectric. In 1916, Piggly Wiggly was the first self-serve American supermarket store in Memphis, Tennessee. In grocery stores of that era, shoppers placed orders with clerks who gathered the goods from store shelves.
To revolutionize the grocery industry and make it easier for shoppers to serve themselves, Saunders came up with a solution to reduce wasted time. The concept was unlike anything ever seen in a grocery store before. Before Saunders' innovation, grocery store customers would line up with their shopping lists. The clerk would collect the orders while the customers waited, taking their lists in turn. As soon as all items were bagged, the clerk would move on to the next customer. Clarence Saunders came up with the idea of self-service where customers enter the store through a turnstile, pick up a shopping basket, select items, then proceed to the cashier. Piggly Wiggly introduced many conveniences and services that American shoppers now take for granted in a modern supermarket chain. Piggly Wiggly was the first to:
Provide checkout stands.
Price every item in the store
Keep produce fresh longer by using refrigerated cases.
Wear uniforms for cleaner, more hygienic food handling.
Utilize patented fixtures and equipment throughout the store.
Franchise independent grocers to operate under a self-service food merchandising model.
The way Clarence Saunders organized the reordering of products was one of his most influential innovations. His system allows the consumer to determine the reordering cadence. By using a fill-up or replenishment system for shelf space products, his system was an early implementation of a pull system.
A Pull System
A big part of Lean Manufacturing and Lean principles is something called a pull system. A pull system controls production in which downstream activities signal their needs to upstream activities. In pull production or just-in-time production, a downstream operation provides information, often via a kanban card, about which parts and materials are needed when and where they are required. Upstream supplier processes produce nothing until downstream customer processes indicate a need.
Toyota Production Systems Influences
Many American influences went into what we today call Lean Manufacturing, Lean practice, and Lean tools. The genesis of Lean comes mostly from Toyota, specifically, a group called Toyota Production Systems (TPS). Many of the TPS practices were innate to both Toyota and the Japanese culture; however, a few methods were influenced by Americans. Henry Ford's Ford Motor Company, assembly line mode was a significant influence and Dr. Deming's ideas after WW2. Another intriguing effect was from some material built by the U.S. during the war called Training Within Industry (TWI). However, the most unlikely impact was Piggly Wiggly.
Taiichi Ohno and the Toyota Production System and Lean Thinking
Taiichi Ohno, sometimes referred to as Taiichi Ono, was born in Dalian, China, in 1912, during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. After completing high school, he had no further formal education. In 1932, he joined the Toyoda Spinning & Weaving company, a few years before Toyota Motor was founded in 1937. When he was at Toyoda Spinning & Weaving, Nichibo was a competitor. During that time, they outperformed Toyoda Spinning & Weaving in both quality and cost. Taiichi Ohno's Toyota Production System was influenced by Nichibo's underlying principles and integrated manufacturing lines and small lot sizes.
In 1943, Ohno moved to the Toyota Motor Company, where three years later, he was in charge of the machining shop. One of the first things he did in the machine shop was to arrange the machines in a sequence of operations, a kind of initial mass production system. He also began to use the idea of supermarkets for pull production in 1948. At this point, Ohno had only heard of U.S. retail supermarkets. Ohno first visited the United States in 1956 to visit a U.S. car manufacturing plant. The size and power of American car plants struck him when he saw them. He knew Toyota could not match the resources of these gigantic factories at the time.
Piggly Wiggly: An Inspiration for Toyota Production Systems
According to the story, Ohno and Kiichiro Toyoda, son of Sakichi Toyoda, visited a Piggly Wiggly and witnessed a pull production or just-in-time production. To develop the Toyota Production System, he applied the "just-in-time" principles he saw at Piggly Wiggly and Piggly Wiggly's supply-and-demand restocking system. Ohno aimed to simplify the production processes of their auto factory by creating Kanban cards that would serve as visual reminders, like the empty shelves at Piggly Wiggly, that there were bins of auto parts in need of replenishment. Later, this became known as Kanban. Suppliers were soon included in this system. Ohno developed Toyota's now-famous Just-in-Time and Kanban tool and pull system. Today many of these ideas can be found in lean software development practices.
Clarence Saunders
Clarence Saunders once was asked why his company was called Piggly Wiggly. When he saw piglets struggling to get under a fence from a train window, the rhyming name came to him. He also said that he tried to find a name that would be talked about and remembered when people asked was, "So people will ask that very question." Clarence Saunders never realized his dream of opening an entirely automated store. He died just as his 'better idea' for a better American Grocery Industry and merchandising began to gain traction. His creativity was decades ahead of its time.
