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Creating Value or Shifting Wealth?
How do we judge the progress of the Lean Movement? One critical indicator is our success in extending lean thinking…
Read article The Big Mura and Mean Leanness
How can we have dramatic short-term gyrations in an economy whose business is to supply what a relatively constant number…
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Using Lean Thinking to Reinvent City Government
In many cities, stagnant tax revenues from a slowing economy coupled with rising healthcare and energy costs are causing budget…
View case study Yokoten Across the World
The trick to yokoten, the term Toyota uses for the horizontal transfer of information and knowledge across an organization, is…
Read article A Journey to Value Streams: Reorganizing Into Five Groups Drives Lean Improvements and Customer Responsiveness
While many plants have used value-stream thinking and practices such as current- and future-state mapping, Parker Hannifin Corporation's New Haven,…
View case study Jumping to Solutions
We are all guilty of one of the greatest sins with lean – not having the patience to really understand…
Read article The Missing Link
There is a missing link between the world’s brilliant objects – now cheaper and better in many cases because of…
Read article Cadence
What do the numbers 1/16, 4/04, 5/03, 5/30, 8/22, 10/23 and 12/20 have in common? They are the dates (day/month)…
Read article Respect for People
For years I've visited companies where "respect for people" is a core element of the corporate philosophy. So I've asked…
Read article “Pulling” Lean Through a Hospital
It's not unusual for North American hospitals to try lean for processes where patient flow most impacts costs or revenue.…
View case study Ten Years and Counting
What do we at LEI -- and in the whole lean movement -- need to do now? This is the…
Read article Kaizen or Rework?
I recently visited a contract electronics manufacturer with a striking capacity for kaizen – the steady improvement of every step…
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