The other day Danish newspaper Politiken had an article about how Toyota is renting a ship to store unsold 1200 cars in the harbour of Malmö, the Swedish town just across Øresund from Copenhagen. My guess would be that there's some hansei - reflection in Japanese - going on at the world's best manufacturer and the inventor of Lean. Obviously, Toyota has been producing to forecast and not to actual custumer pull. Some of the questions the people at Toyota probably could be asking themselves are these: Why didn't we sense the actual market conditions during the fall of 2008 and changed our production schedules? Why did we resolve to wishful thinking about customer demand? Why did we end up with overproduction? - the worst of Toyota Production System genius Taichi Ohno's seven types of waste in manufacturing.

When I saw the picture of unsold cars accompanying the article in Politiken I once again had the thought: Wouldn't it be nice if overproduction could be much more visible in software development? In much software development people are also producing to very uncertain forecasts without being in contact with the actual customer pull. And in software development the forecasts come in the form of big specifications of features that in many instances end up being delayed. And even worse, features not being used by the users when finally implemented.

If we had to rent ships to store all the implemented, but unused features, there might be some more hansei going on to avoid implementing those features in the first place?

By Thomas Blomseth