Lean works better with Industry 4.0 technology. Digital lean programs outperform lean alone because they provide granular data that sharpens traditional tools. But the technology only matters if people use the insights to find root causes and act on them.
First off, I believe that there's a big better-together opportunity around lean Industry 4.0 or digital lean or whatever we want to call it. Whether a company's already been progressing on their lean journey for decades or if they've only recently dipped their toe in the water, my experience is that Industry 4.0 solutions can help drive significantly better results from those efforts. There have been a number of studies by Bain and others that have shown that digital lean programs yield better results than lean initiatives alone. Most of the tools in the lean toolbox use data to some extent, and having higher quality data at a more granular level that's fully contextualized and highly available to everyone simply makes those tools much more effective. And likewise, I believe that some form of operational excellence or lean program has to be in place to really take full advantage of Industry 4.0 initiatives. For example, you can put an IoT system in place to collect data, contextualize that information, share it in pretty charts and graphs, use AI to analyze the information and make recommendations on actions to take. But if nobody takes those actions, or if nobody uses those charts and graphs to perform root cause analysis or something else, then nothing has really improved.
