《When Toyota met e-commerce Lean at Amazon》.pdf

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 4 When Toyota met e-commerce: Lean at Amazon Marc Onetto Amazon’s former head of global operations explains why the company was a natural place to apply lean principles, how they’ve worked in practice, and where the future could lead. The spirit of lean management was already at Amazon when I arrived in 2007. Since the day he created Amazon, Jeff Bezos has been totally customer-centric. He knew that customers would not pay for waste—and that focus on waste prevention is a fundamental concept of lean. The company’s information technology was always very good at understanding what the customer wanted and passing the right signal down. For example, the selection of the transportation method for a given package is driven, first, by the promised delivery date to the customer. Lower-cost options enter the equation only if they provide an equal probability of on-time delivery. That’s basically a lean principle. As a technology company, Amazon initially had the belief that most issues could be resolved with technology, so it was not systematically engaging frontline workers in a process of continuous improvement. Part of lean is the strong engagement of the front line—with the gemba1 workers—on continuous improvement. Amazon has more people working in the fulfillment centers and customer-service centers than it does computer-science engineers. We needed the engagement of all these people to succeed, since they are the ones who are actually receiving, stowing, picking, packin