Several months ago I put up a short paragraph about Zero Lead Time. It was too brief to be useful and yet, according to my site statistics, it is far and away my most widely read post. The range of available zero lead time products has expanded rapidly since then and I feel obligated to delve a little more deeply into the subject.
What Is Zero Lead Time?
From a lean perspective zero lead time means that you can get exactly what you need, exactly when you need it, in exactly the amount you need. Products and services with these characteristics allow both producers and consumers to carry no inventory. This removes all risk of producing large batches before defective products are identified. A consumer will only spend money exactly when they need to spend it, and the physical transportation costs are minimized. In essence it eliminates most of the seven types of Muda after the initial product creation.
What Are Some Zero Lead Time Products
Music - Downloadable digital music was the first zero lead time product to market and is quickly becoming the first to mature. Music has become a Long Tail
industry. Thanks to innovators like Derek Sivers you can now find any song, no matter how obscure, with just a few clicks of a mouse. Derek's Book Anything You Want
is a very good read if you want more insight into how this came about. Musicians worldwide now have multiple options for getting their work in front of fans who will pay them for it. If none of the multitude of companies promoting digital music are the right fit for an artist, they have the option of building their own site for relatively little expense and promoting it through social media. The only remaining gatekeepers in music are a musician's self-doubt and complacency.
Books - E-books and digital audiobooks are rapidly overtaking the print media market. While there will always be a place for small specialty book shops that cater to aficianados, the big national retailers are feeling the pressure. Borders has already closed its stores. Barnes and Noble just managed to get its Nook e-reader into production in time to capture 25% of the market and prevent a similar fate. Publishing houses are having to rethink their business models. Authors can now self publish electronic versions of their work or set their books up for print on demand. There are still some growing pains to be faced in this industry. The quality of self published work is varied. Writers are not necessarily editors. If self publishing authors are not rigorous in seeking reviewers prior to publication the quality of the work can be overshadowed by grammatical distractions. Markets are adaptable however and it is likely that freelance editing is a niche ready to explode.
Movies - The digital delivery options for movies and TV shows fall into two catagories and neither is truly without lead time yet. Streaming services like Netflix can give you instant access to thousands of movies, but you are limited by their current catalog. Amazon and iTunes allow you to download content and play them back without anchoring yourself to an internet connection. My recent experience with iTunes however (a six hour download time) suggests that they have a long way to go to meet the requirement of delivering it when I want it. However both of these models have significant advantages over running to the video store and paying late fees. YouTube has become a plaform for everyone (including my 5 year old son) to try their hand as a writer, actor or director
References - Throughout my education and for most of my career finding an obscure fact that I needed for a current project involved first finding, then paging through a massive volume on a dusty shelf. Invariably I would need to consider the time lapse between the edition that I had and the date of my investigation and adjust my calculations accordingly. Very often the pace of the advancement of the subject was greater than the pace of production for the latest revision of the reference material. With online references however this gap has been closed. Online references and knowledge bases like Wikipedia have vastly improved both the availability and the accuracy of reference materials. Now remote villages in India can access the same information as elite western universities, given a stable broadband connection.
Information - The business of data storage is quickly changing. As broadband networks expand, more and more people have access to rapidly growing cloud based data storage networks. With these services you can have access to all of your files anywhere in the world without a hard drive. What started with Dropbox and backup services like Carbonite has now expanded into Amazon's Cloud Drive and Apple's upcoming iCloud. From punch cards to flash media drives there has always been a need for portability of files, and we have certainly come a long way, but the immediate availability of unlimited storage with instant access will eventually eliminate the entire local data storage industry.
What's Next?
Products - While they are a long way off, there have been advances in 3D printing that now allow uploaded designs to be quickly turned into solid realities. Multiple individual components can be quickly assembled into more complicated functional devices. If you would like to glimpse the future of what distributed open source 3D printing could become, check out Makers
by Corey Doctorow. The technology already works there are only cost barriers to proliferation.
Food (coming soon) - Amazing as it seems, through special cartridges it is now possible to program a meal and click print. Again the technology is not yet cost effective for mass productive for these 3D food printers, but in time, not only will you be able to get a meal in minutes, but you will also have a chance to customize the nutrient profile. See a video of one in action here.
Wrapping Up
The world is getting faster all the time. New technologies are allowing society to leapfrog over its first attempts at advancement. Imagine a digitally interconnected world that allows the next best thing to teleportation. That is the future of zero lead time.
What Is Zero Lead Time?
From a lean perspective zero lead time means that you can get exactly what you need, exactly when you need it, in exactly the amount you need. Products and services with these characteristics allow both producers and consumers to carry no inventory. This removes all risk of producing large batches before defective products are identified. A consumer will only spend money exactly when they need to spend it, and the physical transportation costs are minimized. In essence it eliminates most of the seven types of Muda after the initial product creation.
What Are Some Zero Lead Time Products
Music - Downloadable digital music was the first zero lead time product to market and is quickly becoming the first to mature. Music has become a Long Tail
industry. Thanks to innovators like Derek Sivers you can now find any song, no matter how obscure, with just a few clicks of a mouse. Derek's Book Anything You Want is a very good read if you want more insight into how this came about. Musicians worldwide now have multiple options for getting their work in front of fans who will pay them for it. If none of the multitude of companies promoting digital music are the right fit for an artist, they have the option of building their own site for relatively little expense and promoting it through social media. The only remaining gatekeepers in music are a musician's self-doubt and complacency.Books - E-books and digital audiobooks are rapidly overtaking the print media market. While there will always be a place for small specialty book shops that cater to aficianados, the big national retailers are feeling the pressure. Borders has already closed its stores. Barnes and Noble just managed to get its Nook e-reader into production in time to capture 25% of the market and prevent a similar fate. Publishing houses are having to rethink their business models. Authors can now self publish electronic versions of their work or set their books up for print on demand. There are still some growing pains to be faced in this industry. The quality of self published work is varied. Writers are not necessarily editors. If self publishing authors are not rigorous in seeking reviewers prior to publication the quality of the work can be overshadowed by grammatical distractions. Markets are adaptable however and it is likely that freelance editing is a niche ready to explode.
Movies - The digital delivery options for movies and TV shows fall into two catagories and neither is truly without lead time yet. Streaming services like Netflix can give you instant access to thousands of movies, but you are limited by their current catalog. Amazon and iTunes allow you to download content and play them back without anchoring yourself to an internet connection. My recent experience with iTunes however (a six hour download time) suggests that they have a long way to go to meet the requirement of delivering it when I want it. However both of these models have significant advantages over running to the video store and paying late fees. YouTube has become a plaform for everyone (including my 5 year old son) to try their hand as a writer, actor or director
References - Throughout my education and for most of my career finding an obscure fact that I needed for a current project involved first finding, then paging through a massive volume on a dusty shelf. Invariably I would need to consider the time lapse between the edition that I had and the date of my investigation and adjust my calculations accordingly. Very often the pace of the advancement of the subject was greater than the pace of production for the latest revision of the reference material. With online references however this gap has been closed. Online references and knowledge bases like Wikipedia have vastly improved both the availability and the accuracy of reference materials. Now remote villages in India can access the same information as elite western universities, given a stable broadband connection.
Information - The business of data storage is quickly changing. As broadband networks expand, more and more people have access to rapidly growing cloud based data storage networks. With these services you can have access to all of your files anywhere in the world without a hard drive. What started with Dropbox and backup services like Carbonite has now expanded into Amazon's Cloud Drive and Apple's upcoming iCloud. From punch cards to flash media drives there has always been a need for portability of files, and we have certainly come a long way, but the immediate availability of unlimited storage with instant access will eventually eliminate the entire local data storage industry.
What's Next?
Products - While they are a long way off, there have been advances in 3D printing that now allow uploaded designs to be quickly turned into solid realities. Multiple individual components can be quickly assembled into more complicated functional devices. If you would like to glimpse the future of what distributed open source 3D printing could become, check out Makers
by Corey Doctorow. The technology already works there are only cost barriers to proliferation.Food (coming soon) - Amazing as it seems, through special cartridges it is now possible to program a meal and click print. Again the technology is not yet cost effective for mass productive for these 3D food printers, but in time, not only will you be able to get a meal in minutes, but you will also have a chance to customize the nutrient profile. See a video of one in action here.
Wrapping Up
The world is getting faster all the time. New technologies are allowing society to leapfrog over its first attempts at advancement. Imagine a digitally interconnected world that allows the next best thing to teleportation. That is the future of zero lead time.
No comments:
Post a Comment