Used appropriately, consultants can help create the infrastructure, the framework upon which you build the Global Production System, one step at a time. When labor friction exists, an outside consultant also can gain credibility from both management and the union and begin to bridge historical chasms in trust and working relationships.

Consultants must be carefully selected, managed, and focused. To be effective, they must be focused on empowering people and not on promoting technology. They must also be genuinely supportive of change. Some consultants carry laptops, conduct big expensive studies, make complicated and colorful presentations based on the results, and submit a bill before they've even started helping you change. I would not recommend such consultants for speeding the journey to lean, world-class production.

If you use consultants without deliberate planning and thought, you'll never be able to hammer together a lean, world-class production system. What may emerge in its place is a complex system such as materials resource planning (MRP), which still relies on a philosophy of pushing product out, rather than adapting processes to a demand-pull orientation. Such detours create waste instead of eliminating it. You can recognize such attempts at mirroring a lean, world-class production system because they usually hinge on computers on the factory floor that store outdated information reflecting yesterday's status. It will be an expensive system a system that will one day be dismantled, either to move on to another faddish technology or because the company has gone bust.