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Move Your Operations to China? Do some lean math first.
I recently got a phone call from a reporter for The Wall Street Journal with a simple but provocative question:…
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Seasoned Lean Effort Avoids “Flavor-of-the-Month” Pitfall
What comes first in a lean transformation? What comes next? Where do tools like six sigma fit? Here's an overview…
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Year-end Message About the State of the Lean Community
As I've noted before with some sadness, economic distress is good for lean thinking. Taiichi Ohno said long ago that…
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Substituting Money for Value Stream Management
I've been traveling again since I last wrote, this time to visit a household-name American company trying to pursue perfection…
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The “Right Sequence” for Implementing Lean
One of the best things about leading the Lean Enterprise Institute is that I travel widely to learn how things…
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What do you need from LEI?
August 1 marks the fifth anniversary of the Lean Enterprise Institute. In our first five years we've conducted Lean Summits…
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A Great Time for Lean Thinking
I’ve just been reading the financial news and realizing that this is a great time to be a lean thinker.…
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LEI Expands Global Network
When I founded the Lean Enterprise Institute in Boston in 1997, I wanted to create a global network of non-profit…
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LEI’s indicator that can’t lie: Doing the math
Jim elaborates on the idea of using inventory turns as a measure of lean transformation
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Getting Back to Basics
I recently had a request from a Detroit newspaper to write a brief piece for the Motor Show on how…
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LEI’s new tool for seeing the big picture
We introduce the latest LEI workbook, Seeing the Whole, which provides a simple tool for mapping the extended value stream…
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Inventory Turns Charts
How can you tell if your firm is really getting lean — count the future state maps on the walls,…
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