FEATURE – With lockdowns enforced in many countries as Covid-19 continues to ravage the world, the authors discuss how Lean Thinking can help when the order book dries up.
FEATURE – The approach described here, first adopted by this Chinese company, directly connects the daily work in manufacturing with an organization’s financial results.
RESEARCH – What kind of financial results can a SME owner expect from a lean transformation? To find out, the author of this interesting research analyzed the performance of 100 Italian small and medium-sized companies.
FEATURE – The benefits of establishing a lean operating system will support the growth and success of a business in the long term, says Karen Gaudet looking back at her experience at Starbucks.
ARTICLE – Standardization is often ignored and misunderstood, but is as critical to a lean transformation as continuous improvement. This piece by our Polish team explains why standard work is not to be neglected.
INTERVIEW – Does your company feel like a sand castle? Do you struggle to sustain lean results? At the recent Lean Transformation Summit, the CEO of Lantech told us how the firm is using daily management to prevent “deterioration”.
WOMACK'S YOKOTEN – In our lean journeys we spend so much time on improvement (kaizen) and innovation (kaikaku) that we often forget to address the issue of how to maintain our gains. Do you know iji? Perhaps you should.
OPINION – Look at today's disruptive companies and you'll see how all of them have understood that real innovation calls for close proximity to the customer, rather than for stubbornly taking cover in the comfort of the upstream.
FEATURE – By offering an alternative approach to management, lean thinking has disrupted the business world in the past three decades. But in what way has it really innovated?
WOMACK’S YOKOTEN - When managed poorly and tied to the wrong performance metrics, financial rewards can seriously damage your organization, Jim Womack warns in his latest column.
ARTICLE - Organizing for learning is critical to sustaining your kaizen efforts and improving your company. Choose the right managers, make sure they can self-develop and develop others, and help lean to take root.
FEATURE – Is your organization process-oriented or results-oriented? The fourth article of Hazards on the road to lean looks at what happens when you focus on the what, but not on the how.
CASE STUDY – Thousands of kaizens, a relentless focus on learning and the determination to continuously improve have made of this Norwegian company something of a lean fairytale.
FEATURE – A laboratory testing services firm in Istanbul has turned to lean management to reduce complexity, shorten lead-times, and make its growth sustainable.
WOMACK'S YOKOTEN – Effective daily management is still hard to achieve for most organizations. But until line managers start tackling problems first hand as they emerge, rather than deferring and delegating them, basic stability will remain a mirage.
FEATURE – The Palo Alto Medical Foundation has used lean to redesign workflows in its primary care clinics since late 2011. With changes now spread to a total of 17 facilities, the team started to analyze what it took to sustain the results achieved.
ONE QUESTION, FIVE ANSWERS – Change might be scary but, when things do work out, it also brings us incredible pride and sense of accomplishment. We asked five practitioners to tell us what the most satisfying moment in their lean journey was.
WOMACK'S YOKOTEN – How it is that some ideas and innovations spread like wildfire while others are slower to take roots? It is clear that lean thinking belongs to the latter category, but how can we speed up its diffusion?
FEATURE - An initial look into the impact of lean management principles on the growth of young organizations hopes to encourage further analysis into why and how lean startups succeed.
FEATURE – For the last article of their series, the authors ask themselves the ultimate question: who wins at lean, and who loses? What makes change sustainable? Turns out, it’s all about the fundamentals.
VIDEO CASE STUDY – In the past couple of years, the Consorci Sanitari del Garraf has been able to leverage the commitment of its people to perform a lean turnaround. Its story shows you don’t need lots of resources and money to do lean in a hospital.
INTERVIEW – Tom and Mary Poppendieck sit down with Roberto Priolo and discuss what makes product organizations successful today and where lean software development is headed.
CASE STUDY – A very lean system that runs like clockwork and constant attention to customer service enable Barcelona-based 365.café to achieve the impossible: supplying 55 bakeries out of a 650-sqm factory.
FEATURE – A kaizen suggestion scheme has the ability to unlock the potential of lean change in our organizations, but too often our mistakes kill it before it even has a chance to take off and gain momentum.
FEATURE – We can have the best processes in place and the best people on payroll, but if our goals are wrong our drive towards lean management won't be enough. Part 3 of Hazards on the road to lean.
FEATURE – Until “check” and “act” become a natural part of daily work, we will always need formal audits to keep people focused and to sustain results. Here’s a few tips to make them work.
WOMACK’S YOKOTEN – If truly embraced, lean thinking sustains and (in the long run) even creates jobs, but if a transformation is to last these jobs must be “good,” says Jim Womack.
INTERVIEW – How many times have you been asked, “What is the ROI of lean?” Jean Cunningham provides her insight to help you measure the financial impact of your lean improvements.
FEATURE - Whether an organization pursues a lean transformation often depends on the early financial results - the low hanging fruit - it's able to achieve. This article offers a model to meet business needs while ensuring a transformation lasts.
