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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…
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Breaking Through To Flow
The other day I began a speech to a leading supplier of medical devices by congratulating them on the absolutely…
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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”
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Lean Lessons for 2006
This is the year when Toyota will almost certainly overtake General Motors to become number one in the global car…
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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…
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Process Leadership
I first heard the term Kaikaku over ten years ago when travelling with a Toyota Sensei around Japan, while researching…
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The Big Opportunity
I started studying manufacturing performance††26 years ago this fall. We set out at MIT to perform the most exhaustive and…
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Necessary But Not Sufficient
One of the hardest things in my line of work is seeing a company make enormous strides in getting lean…
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Competing with China
There are two sea changes going on in the world economy. The first is the rise of the “low cost”…
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Massachusetts General Looks to Lean
Northeast Proton Therapy Center uses lean principles to increase capacity to treat life-threatening diseases.
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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.
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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…
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