Articles
Learn more about your selected topics.
A Tale of Two Business Systems
In the fall of 1990, The Machine That Changed the World forecast that 1991 or 1992 would be the moment…
Read article
Breaking Through To Flow
The other day I began a speech to a leading supplier of medical devices by congratulating them on the absolutely…
Read article Just in Time, Just in Case, and Just Plain Wrong
Jim Womack responds the the January 12th Wall Street Journal headline “Just-In-Time Inventories Make U.S. Vulnerable to a Pandemic”
Read article Lean Lessons for 2006
This is the year when Toyota will almost certainly overtake General Motors to become number one in the global car…
Read article Mr. Ford’s Wrong Turn
In an op-ed piece in The Washington Post, James P. Womack, founder and chairman of the Lean Enterprise Institute, responds…
Read article Process Leadership
I first heard the term Kaikaku over ten years ago when travelling with a Toyota Sensei around Japan, while researching…
Read article The Big Opportunity
I started studying manufacturing performance††26 years ago this fall. We set out at MIT to perform the most exhaustive and…
Read article Necessary But Not Sufficient
One of the hardest things in my line of work is seeing a company make enormous strides in getting lean…
Read article Competing with China
There are two sea changes going on in the world economy. The first is the rise of the “low cost”…
Read article
Massachusetts General Looks to Lean
Northeast Proton Therapy Center uses lean principles to increase capacity to treat life-threatening diseases.
View case study
Value-Stream Mapping in a Make-to-Order Environment
Tips from LEI author Mike Rother on applying value-stream mapping and continuous flow in high-variety, custom manufacturing environments.
Read article Lean Publishing and Lean Solutions
Normally I walk through other people’s industries. But today let me take a brief walk through my own: publishing. You…
Read article