Lean in France

Learning at takt time in Thales

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    string(1593) "The term “lean production” refers to the set of tools and techniques used to streamline and improve a company’s production system. With its roots in the Toyota Production System, lean production aims to boost productivity while reducing waste. Companies that successfully embrace lean production methods can achieve impressive improvements in their performance. The superiority of a lean production system was first identified by Womack and Jones during their research on Japanese carmakers. Initially, it was believed that lean was only applicable to production, whereas today we know those principles can be applied in any sector.

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.

The main characteristics of a lean production system are the fact the different stages of production happen in a sequence without interruptions (known as flow) and that the pace of production is set by the customers (pull)."
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InterviewsJun 11, 2019
Norbert Dubost
INTERVIEW – A former VP of Operations from Thales tells Catherine Chabiron how he and his team turned around their department by committing to lean thinking and focusing on people development every day.

Down the right track

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FeaturesApr 16, 2019
Catherine Chabiron
NOTES FROM THE GEMBA – The author goes back to a train maintenance center she visited two years ago and finds an organization striving to learn continuously.

Lean caters for our product development needs

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At its core, Lean Product and Process Development aims to create the exact product that people want. And it is clear that developing better products reaching the market faster means profitability into the future. In general terms, lean product development achieves this by creating reusable knowledge that can be used in future iterations of a product and by deployment set-based concurrent engineering (which entails considering sets of designs at once to quickly eliminate inferior solutions, thus shortening development times). It is also useful to integrate the work of engineers with that of the manufacturing department, so that shop floor receives a well-researched, mistake-proof product that is ready for production without the need for extensive and expensive rework.

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FeaturesMar 19, 2019
Catherine Chabiron
NOTES FROM THE GEMBA – This French company has completely transformed its approach to designing and introducing new products to market by embracing lean product development ideas.

Detecting improvement opportunities

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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.”

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At a time when innovation is the biggest factor behind the success or failure of an organization, finding ways to speed up the development of new products and to ensure these products correspond to actual customer needs is of the utmost importance.

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FeaturesFeb 19, 2019
Catherine Chabiron
NOTES FROM THE GEMBA – A culture in which problems are tackled as soon as they appear and the production and product development teams work closely together is helping this French healthcare technology company to thrive.

Lean delivery

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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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FeaturesJan 15, 2019
Catherine Chabiron
NOTES FROM THE GEMBA – After re-insourcing its bike repair workshop, a distribution center of France's La Poste has begun to recover long-lost knowledge about the work of mailmen and using it to innovate.

Ferreting out lean improvements at a web company

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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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FeaturesNov 20, 2018
Catherine Chabiron
NOTES FROM THE GEMBA – The author visits a comparison website that is gradually integrating agile and lean thinking in its processes, identifying new and exciting improvement opportunities.
Learn about the lean transformation of French playground maker Proludic

A playground for lean teamwork and collaboration

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At a time when innovation is the biggest factor behind the success or failure of an organization, finding ways to speed up the development of new products and to ensure these products correspond to actual customer needs is of the utmost importance.

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FeaturesSep 5, 2018
Catherine Chabiron
FEATURE – Enabling its people to think autonomously about problems and fostering collaboration among departments is allowing a French company that makes and installs playgrounds to thrive.

Le lean, c’est fantastique!

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InterviewsJul 27, 2018
Marie-Pia Ignace
GETTING TO KNOW US – We sit for a chat with the President of Institut Lean France. Not only has ILF created a vibrant community of lean CEOs in France; it also launched one of the most innovative lean events out there.
gemba walk Paris Ouest Construction

How a construction company survived the recession using lean

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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.

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FeaturesJun 16, 2017
Catherine Chabiron
NOTES FROM THE GEMBA – With a strong focus on quality and on solving problems once and for all, Paris Ouest Construction has managed to weather the storm of the recession, the author finds out during a gemba walk.
Gemba walk Alliance Chabiron

People development and competitivess – the Alliance story

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FeaturesMay 15, 2017
Catherine Chabiron
NOTES FROM THE GEMBA – This month, Catherine visits a metal injection moulding specialist and hears about the strong link between growing people’s capabilities with lean thinking and staying competitive in a complex market.
Proditec gemba walk Chabiron

A gemba walk at a manufacturer of tablet inspecting machines

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FeaturesApr 6, 2017
Catherine Chabiron
NOTES FROM THE GEMBA – Follow Catherine on another one of her gemba walks around French companies. This time, she visits a manufacturer of inspecting machines near Bordeaux, with a visionary leader and a great story.
Hôpital Lariboisière lean in healthcare

The first steps of a Paris hospital towards lean healthcare

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    string(1608) "Lean thinking may have been born in Toyota in the 1950s and 1960s, but it wasn’t until after the year 2000 that a few hospitals began to explore its application to the healthcare industry (lean healthcare). These pioneering organizations came together to share their stories at the first Global Lean Healthcare Summit in the UK in 2007, which in turn triggered many more experiments around the world. Since then, interest has kept growing.

Some fifteen years on, we have hundreds of examples to learn from, from clinics and departments through to entire hospitals and even whole hospital systems. Not all early experiments succeeded, and we are still a long way from making lean a widely recognized way of working across the industry.
Healthcare providers around the world still face huge challenges, as ageing populations and unhealthy lifestyles boost the demand for healthcare faster than the growth of incomes and tax revenues from the middle classes. At the same time, the quality of care has not improved as much as the quality of other services in the economy, which is why more and more healthcare organizations are turning to lean.

Historically, lean healthcare ideas have been applied in large hospitals, but in the past few years we have started to see the philosophy adopted in earnest in many smaller organizations following a do-it-yourself approach that has generated many positive benefits. An impressive example is the Consorci Sanitari del Garraf near Barcelona."
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FeaturesJan 13, 2017
Catherine Chabiron
NOTES FROM THE GEMBA – On this gemba walk in the cardiology department of a Parisian hospital, the author discovers how the team is changing its internal dynamics and processes to make lean their way of thinking.
SNCF train maintenance

Follow the gemba walk in a SNCF train maintenance center

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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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FeaturesNov 7, 2016
Catherine Chabiron
NOTES FROM THE GEMBA - We follow the author on a visit to a train maintenance center in France. Through practical examples and pictures from the gemba, she explains how the center is transforming itself.
ACS lean engineering

The incredible lean turnaround of an engineering department

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    string(1553) "This is another new frontier for lean thinking, not because lean efforts in engineering have only begun recently but because it wasn’t until the last few years that a systematic attempt to codify these techniques has been made. These techniques and ideas are loosely brought together under the concept of Lean Product and Process Development (LPPD).

At a time when innovation is the biggest factor behind the success or failure of an organization, finding ways to speed up the development of new products and to ensure these products correspond to actual customer needs is of the utmost importance.

At its core, Lean Product and Process Development aims to create the exact product that people want. And it is clear that developing better products reaching the market faster means profitability into the future. In general terms, lean product development achieves this by creating reusable knowledge that can be used in future iterations of a product and by deployment set-based concurrent engineering (which entails considering sets of designs at once to quickly eliminate inferior solutions, thus shortening development times). It is also useful to integrate the work of engineers with that of the manufacturing department, so that shop floor receives a well-researched, mistake-proof product that is ready for production without the need for extensive and expensive rework.

Interesting contamination exists here with improvement approaches like Lean Startup and Design for Manufacturing."
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FeaturesOct 20, 2016
Stéphane Moreau & Frédéric Masson
FEATURE – A French automotive supplier has been applying lean principles to transform its engineering department with great results. In the process, they have realized they could put in place a really effective system to build innovation.
lean construction gemba story

A gemba story to study lean thinking 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.

Technology is providing new opportunities for the sector, with 3D and 4D software tools taking the lead. Technological advances, coupled with the adoption of solid improvement practices, like lean construction methodology, in the construction industry, means we can design and build better, safer and lasting buildings - also guaranteeing working infrastructure for our increasingly urban world."
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FeaturesApr 27, 2016
John Bouthillon
INDUSTRY FOCUS – Drawing from his direct experience at the gemba, the author shares what he learned about applying lean thinking to his family’s construction company, and a few useful tips.

A leader can never stop running experiments

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    string(1594) "Manufacturing is where the lean movement originated from. For their MIT research in the late 1980s (which resulted in the 1990 seminal book The Machine the Changed the World), Jim Womack and Dan Jones identified a set of principles and techniques that made Japanese carmakers far more productive than their Western competitors.

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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InterviewsDec 17, 2015
Roberto Priolo
PROFILE – Before anything else, a good lean leader must be open to changing and continuously running experiments – something Christophe Riboulet, CEO of a small French manufacturer, knows quite a bit about.

Starting out with lean thinking? Refer to the original TPS

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    string(1378) "The idea of “lean management” can refer to both individual managerial behaviors and, more in general, the set of principles and practices characterizing the adoption of lean thinking in an organization.

In the first case, lean management is closer in meaning to the idea of “lean leadership” and entails the development of behaviors that foster continuous improvement at the front line, such as respect for people, asking questions (rather than providing answers), going to see to really understand the work and the causes of problems, and scientific problem solving. In the second instance, lean management describes the lean philosophy more in general.

In its more general meaning, lean management – or lean thinking, if you prefer – derives from the Toyota Production System and is now recognized as a superior management approach that, through continuous improvement, customer focus, teamwork and relentless people engagement, leads to great results in terms of quality, performance, delivery, and cost. The promise of lean management is to create the most value for customers using the least possible amount of resources. As an approach to running a business, it brings benefits to all parties involved, from customers to employees, suppliers to wider society.

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FeaturesDec 3, 2015
Michael Ballé & Boris Evesque
FEATURE ARTICLE – Starting off a lean journey is no easy feat, and existing models won’t tell you what the next steps are. That’s why you should go back to basics and let the Toyota Production System “house” from the mid-1980s show you the way.
lean startup pezziardi interview

Using lean startup ideas to redesign service to citizens

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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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    string(1557) "Mention the word 'government' pretty much anywhere in the world and you'll be met by angry comments citing inefficiency, bureaucratic red tape and frustration. Arguably, no sector could benefit more from the application of lean management. Lean is all about simplifying and rationalizing, a need that will become more and more stringent for government organizations worldwide as their budgets are squeezed.

Experiments in the application of lean government in the public sector go back a few years, with a difficulty commonly raised being “seeing the work”. An early, notable and very successful example of lean government is City of Melbourne, where lean brought a common language that managed to link the work of 30+ government agencies. Other examples are Ministries in the UK, municipalities in the Netherlands, the Dubai Police and cities in the USA. In Grand Rapids, the Fire Department started a lean journey some 10 years ago, which ended up spreading to every other area of city government. There is even a state-wide lean transformation taking place at Washington State.

Lean government organizations provide higher quality, faster and more transparent service to citizens. Since lean thinking can be successfully applied to any human endeavor, lean government ideas can improve any type of public sector work, whether legislative, executive or judicial (see the work done in the HM Courts and Tribunal Service in the United Kingdom)."
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InterviewsNov 19, 2015
Pierre Pezziardi
INTERVIEW – When we think of innovation we rarely think of government, and yet the public sector is in desperate need to modernize and improve. Pierre Pezziardi is on a mission to bring innovation to the French government.