Focus

Sorting out sourcing

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FeaturesFeb 20, 2020
Carolina Moraes, Priscilla Ribeiro, Alaine Soares, and Tatiane Zutin
FEATURE – The Sourcing team at insurance company SulAmérica tells us about how they were able to transform the process in their department in order to become more efficient in dealing with their workload.

Predictable vs unpredictable work

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FeaturesFeb 6, 2020
Dave Brunt
FEATURE – It is a common misconception that our work is too unpredictable to fit into a standardized approach. The author debunks this myth. 

Grievances first

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FeaturesFeb 3, 2020
Catherine Chabiron
NOTES FROM THE GEMBA – How do you kick off a lean journey? This French company has chosen to begin by analyzing and tackling each customer complaint.

A 15-year journey of people engagement

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Case studiesJan 30, 2020
Tom Root
CASE STUDY – Here’s the story of a mature lean company from Michigan. The author tells us about Zingerman’s Mail Order’s lean transformation, their challenges and their successes.

Extracting waste from our process

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Case studiesJan 23, 2020
Rodnei Yogui
CASE STUDY – In a Brazilian insurance company, a team worked hard to streamline the revision of dental claims – a great example of Lean Thinking in an administrative process. 

Half the bad, double the good

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Case studiesJan 20, 2020
Eivind Reke and Kenneth Gilje
CASE STUDY – The story of this Norwegian window and door manufacturer shows how a deep and ongoing commitment to a lean transformation can help a company thrive against all odds.

New Year loss and found

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FeaturesJan 13, 2020
John Shook
FEATURE – 2019 was another momentous year for the Lean Community. John Shook reflects on what we lost and what we gained in the last year of the decade.

A year in lean articles

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FeaturesDec 23, 2019
Roberto Priolo
FEATURE – As 2019 draws to an end, our editor looks back at best lean articles of the year and tells us why Lean Thinking should give us hope for the future.

What is hoshin kanri?

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FeaturesDec 19, 2019
Roberto Priolo
ROUNDUP – In the last roundup on lean tools and concepts of the year, our editor collects and curates the best articles on strategy deployment (hoshin kanri).

Bringing lean to the people

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Case studiesDec 16, 2019
Vagner Agostinho Junior
CASE STUDY – This article briefly outlines the different stages of the lean transformation at Mercedes Benz Brazil, as the company looked for the best approach to engage everyone in continuous improvement.

When startups visit Toyota

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    string(1476) "Improvement methodologies have been used in the software world for a very long time, with approaches like Agile and Lean digital methodology playing a key role in speeding up the development of digital products. Agile principles and ideas - like Scrum and its way of structuring teams and organizing the work - have found their ways into many a lean company. Lean digital thinking and the Toyota Production System, in turn, have greatly influenced the development of these approaches.

Lean Digital is the methodology by which companies apply lean principles to the development process of new digital products.

The world of startups and entrepreneurship has also drawn a lot of inspiration from lean management. Eric Ries' best-selling book The Lean Startup offers a framework for quick experimentation and validation of learning that is often viewed as an interpretation of lean's PDCA cycle - and the very idea of involving the customer at different stages of the process clearly reminds of the fundamental lean idea of listening to the Voice of the Customer.

Despite this great level of cross-contamination, however, a disconnect still exists between the world of 'traditional lean' and that of young, digital companies. A few pioneering organizations such as softrware company Theodo are trying to bridge that gap by solidly applying lean thinking to their digital work. This is a new frontier for lean thinking."
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FeaturesDec 12, 2019
Sandrine Olivencia, Lucie Notaro & Régis Medina
FEATURE – Digital organizations are starting to recognize that Toyota’s unique approach can show them the way forward, just like it does “traditional” organizations. Here, we hear from a few startup CEOs following their trip to Japan.

Daily management in construction

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    string(1440) "The construction industry has a reputation for delays, bad quality and unsafe working conditions. This makes it a prime candidate for the implementation of lean principles and techniques. The idea of 'lean construction' has been around since the early 1990s, when a group of academics in California started to look at opportunities for the application of lean in the sector. One of the results of this early work was the introduction of the Last Planner System to better manage construction sites.

The lean construction movement soon spread to other parts of the world, starting with the UK - where it influenced a number of organizations and large projects, like the construction of St Pancras station in London. Large construction companies quickly took on lean management. Like in other industries, at the beginning the adoption of lean focused heavily on the application of tools, whereas more recently the strategic importance of lean management has been recognized by the industry.

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Case studiesDec 9, 2019
Renato Mariz et al
FEATURE – How lean daily management helped a Brazilian construction company to stabilize production in a tailing dam elevation project.

The community and the individual

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Opinion piecesDec 5, 2019
Peter Willats
COLUMN – As individuals, how do we relate to the Lean Community? And what motivates us to stubbornly continue down the improvement path, often against all odds?

Change management from the inside out

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FeaturesDec 2, 2019
Karen Gaudet
FEATURE – The author discusses how the daily practice of lean thinking develops perseverance and the grit a leader needs to improve an organization.

Practice makes perfect

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FeaturesNov 28, 2019
Dave Brunt
FEATURE – Much like lean management, attaining perfection in music requires constant practice. The author looks back at his musical past and at a recent Lean Global Network samba gig.

Attorney at lean

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    string(1637) "While lean government and lean healthcare technically fall under this category, we consider lean service organizations to be those operating in areas like call centers, retail, hotels, restaurants, offices, banking, and so on. In such environments, there is a direct interaction with the customer, which should be seen as an opportunity to get real-time feedback on our service rather than a nuisance we have to deal with (if you have ever spoken with a customer care representative, you know what this means).

A common problem that practitioners trying to bring lean to services encounter is the difficulty to identify “the work” – whereas in manufacturing the product is in front of everyone’s eyes, in service organizations it is often hidden behind paperwork or a computer screen. Once the work is clearly visible, however, the opportunities for improvement are plentiful. To date, we have seen thousands of organizations striving to lean out the service they provide customers: from restaurants chains in the United States and China to a group of bakeries in Barcelona, from call centers to hotels, the application of lean services ideas can have an extraordinary impact on our economies. Especially if we consider that the service industry accounts for more than three-fifths of the global GDP and employs more than one-third of the global workforce.

Lean thinking is naturally a fit for the service industry, because of its focus on constantly delighting customers and on providing them with value-adding products."
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Case studiesNov 21, 2019
Eulalia Malimpensa
CASE STUDY – A boutique law firm in Milan has initiated a lean transformation to turn around its processes, improve service to its clients and make life easier for the team.  

The gateway to success

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The superiority of the Toyota Production System is now a recognized fact (Toyota has been profitable every year but one, for half a century), which means that today most manufacturing organizations around the world practice lean manufacturing thinking to some extent. The prevalence of this alternative way of thinking and managing in the manufacturing sector often generates confusion in other industries, in which people’s first reaction to improvement attempts is the now proverbial “We don’t make cars. Lean is a manufacturing thing.”

When applied to manufacturing, lean tools like heijunka, SMED or Kanban cards allow for the optimization of production processes and the systematic elimination of waste (in its three incarnations of muda, muri and mura – respectively, non-value-adding work, overburden and unevenness). These happen by implementing the fundamental lean principles of pull and flow. However, it has now been proved that the principles characterizing lean manufacturing are universally applicable. They work in any sector and they apply to any kind of work – even though at times they require some adjustment."
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With more and more organizations (not just manufacturing firms) turning to automation to try and solve every-day problems, lean production offers an approach that gives the operators and their work the dignity they deserve. This idea is best expressed by the concept of the andon, a cord hanging above lean production lines that operators can pull whenever they encounter a problem they can’t solve right way (this is the base of the fundamental lean principles of jidoka, “automation with a human touch”). Lean is clearly an alternative to reckless management that considers people as mere capital.

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FeaturesNov 11, 2019
Catherine Chabiron
NOTES FROM THE GEMBA – By introducing flow in its processes and transforming its approach to managing the business, this French manufacturer of fences and gates is building a competitive advantage.

The iron law of scale-up

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FeaturesOct 24, 2019
Michael Ballé
FEATURE – As our social systems grow, we need an effective way to manage them. This makes bureaucracies an inescapable part of life for our society and businesses. But how can we mitigate their negative effects?