Something for the Weekend - Mystery Flavour

I spotted a great example of LEAN practices this week that I really wanted to share. You may remember before Christmas I wrote about the importance of establishing flow in processes with the article of the Empire State Building, this isn't quite as impressive as building the world's tallest building in a year but its good thinking all the same!

Dum Dums are a US lollipop and they started creating a 'Mystery Flavour' in 2001. Basically Mystery Flavour is a by product that the manufacturing process creates as it switched from one 'actual' flavour to another. So you might get a mix of Cherry Cola and Banana split… quite good fun but also a really good example thinking differently.

Two things are noteworthy with this example:

• The downtime of shutting down production, cleaning and restarting would obviously cost more than the waste - so they've got the LEAN flow principles down correctly by leaving the machines running and increasing production.
• Creating value from waste that can’t be removed is an interesting thought. Do we have unavoidable waste that could used to better effect?

Sources & Credits
Thanks to Dum Dums and the Signal Vs Noise Blog reflections on programming by products