Agile Manufacturing - practical? applicable? possible??

Having worked as an agile coach/trainer with more than 32 organizations like Mercedes Benz, HP, IBM, CISCO, Flipkart, Hike Messenger, Linked in, Jio, Fidelity et al, I came across some very interesting, useful and intriguing insights about how the "agile mindset" actually worked, how it failed and how it can be put to some good use. Being a regular blogger at that time, I was tempted to share these insights with the community - however, bound by ethics as well as the "Non Disclosure Agreements", it was best to avoid the same.

So why this blog? There are multiple inspirations for coming up with this blog post:

1. All these years, while serving as a coach, trainer, advocate, practitioner of agile mindset in the software world, I always wondered if my knowledge is any good if I can not implement the same in a physical/hardware/manufacturing paradigm. Afterall, we, the software world, learnt it from the manufacturing itself - The Toyota's way of working - and adopted it to suit software. Therefore, I jumped at the opportunity that came as an invitation to join a manufacturing firm and see if I can add value to it. This blog post is my attempt to share the exciting insights I got while working there.
2. Many of my friends, colleagues and associates wondered where did my blogs disappear since the day I started with this manufacturing firm - I distanced myself, on purpose, from the kudos of the past and dedicated myself as a fresher in the manufacturing paradigm, learning the way it worked (its a different world). So this blog post is also a "Hello (again) world" of sorts.
3. I finally have a customer who's happy to share whatever I feel can help the community, and doesn't bind me with NDAs and policies.

So here I am... excited, unbounded and more than ready to share what I learned during my stint with this amazing manufacturing firm.

Before we dive-in, here's a quick "About Us" of the manufacturing firm:

1. One of the FIRST and the PIONEERS of manufacturing PVC pipes for deep borewell, cooling towers, strainers, filters etc.
2. Exclusive manufacturer of 5 ltr HDPE containers for a National Adhesive Brand
3. Mass producers of PET bottles for Alcohol Industry
4. Biggest manufacturer of Heavy-duty PET bottles for branded thinner industry
5. Innovative and ground breaking products in LED Lighting industry
6. Founders and promoters from IIT, BITS (Pilani) having an "out of the box" thinking culture and a principle of re-investing most of the revenues back into innovation, experimentation and learning.

Alright, having the "pleasantries" exchanged, let's dive straight-in. When I actually started to pen-down my thoughts and learnings, I was astonished at the number of points that were there on the paper. I was blown by the number of Agile principles that were knowingly or unknowingly applied in my attempt to improve the results at this manufacturing unit. It all suddenly started making much more sense.

As Steve Jobs said - "you can only connect the dots looking backwards and never forward"

In-fact by the time I sort-of completed the list, I knew that it was long enough to NOT qualify as a single blog/article - I had to break it down into more palatable sizes. And hence, this blog series is divided into these parts:

Part 1: The Background (This is the part you are reading at this moment)

Part 2: SMALL, INDEPENDENT, MEASUREABLE, TESTABLE tasks/stories actually help get (much) more stuff done...

Part 3: INFORMATION HIGHLIGHTERS put to good use can be a GAME CHANGER!

Part 4: People over processes, Inspect-and-adapt, iterate-and-increment and software best practices like test first, automation, reuse etc put to good use in manufacturing too!

If you've reached thus far and are ready to dive deeper, head over to PART 2 here...