Today was the first official day of our Lean study tour "Roots of Lean 2009" in Japan. We started out this day by visiting Fujitsu Applications Ltd. in Tokyo. President and CEO Jun Watanabe gave us an introduction to how Fujitsu Applications had implemented Toyota Production System/Lean in their software development business.

Two things stuck me in particular.
1) Their use of standardized work (well-defined processes for how, when, and what to do). In the Fujitsu case I believe this was one of the major contributors to the productivity improvement they had experienced. Throughput had gone up by a factor of 7 - over a period of 6 years - without hiring more people!!
    
2) Changing the method of software developmet to a very manufacturing-like way had certainly improved productivity, compared to what they did before their TPS transformation. However I asked myself: They are paying salary to 300 employees - are they really utilizing the talent that they are paying for? I got the impression that maybe they were focusing a bit too much on Point Kaizen rather than System Kaizen.

Also we met Tomoya Saito who gave a talk on how Fujitsu Applications were crunching data from employee timesheets and measurements of progress in a way I have never seen before. What they were trying, was to do really fast estimation on a large scale. They were doing this using statistical theory and a high volume of historical data. I did initially feel slightly skeptical about it, but it has surely given me something to think about!

By Sune Gynthersen