Lean Action Research Themes

Our Action Research involves working with organisations at different stages of their lean journey but we are keen to work with pioneers to develop new ways of defining value from the customer’s perspective - in healthcare, mobility and other service sectors.

Designing Lean Healthcare Systems

Marc baker "Lean thinking is a way of streamlining the patient journey and making it safer, by helping staff to eliminate all kinds of waste and to treat more patients with existing resources."

Marc Baker, Lean Enterprise Academy

Making Hospitals Work

Making Hospitals Work is LEA's latest publication aimed at helping healthcare organisations improve the patient journey.

Lean Thinking for the NHS

Although the NHS has made significant progress over the last few years, there is a nagging doubt that the improvements should have been more significant

Also see Daniel Jones’ Lean Thinking for the NHS powerpoint presentation

Reflections on Lean Healthcare

It is still unclear whether lean thinking will turn out to be a wave or a fundamental driver for change in healthcare (video)

Can Lean Save Healthcare?

In this interview David Ben Tovim from Flinders medical Centre in Adelaide, Australia, one of the lean pioneers talks about their progress with lean

Lean Healthcare Events

The First Global Lean Healthcare Summit brought together the lean pioneers to launch the lean healthcare movement proceedings of this and our Healthcare Forums now available

Creating Lean Healthcare

Ten years ago I visited the Mayo Clinic. I was not there as a medical patient. Instead I was a sort of lean anthropologist

Leaning Healthcare

Healthcare is the next great industry to begin the lean journey. The existing model is reaching the end of the road

Leaning Sales and Service

“In sales and service, Lean thinking focuses on delivering value to the customer 'right first time, on time, every time' with customer convenience and service.”

John Kiff, The Lean Enterprise Academy

Creating Lean Dealers

Creating Lean Dealers is a DIY guide to enable dealers to achieve a step-change in performance for themselves to give a win-win-win for customers, dealer staff and shareholders.

What is Lean Thinking?

30 minute express service And how does it apply to car dealers? Lean Thinking is simply the generic version of the Toyota Production System. A Lean organisation uses less of everything to achieve a given output.

Cases and examples

Read about the real-life successes achieved by pioneering Lean dealers in Europe

Major Portuguese Group
Single franchise dealership in Ireland
Small Swiss group

Downloads ...

Download a PowerPoint presentation which answers the question: Does Lean Thinking Apply to Dealers?

Creating end-to-end value streams ...

Dave Brunt "When you have learned to see value streams in individual facilites, it’s time to see, and then to optimise, entire value streams from raw materials to customer."

David Brunt, Lean Enterprise Academy

Seeing The Whole

Supply Chains For the tens of thousands of users of value stream mapping at the facility level, Seeing the Whole provides the logical next step, extending the field of view all the way up and down the value stream.

Unscrambling Supply Chains

The other day I was with a group of senior executives puzzling over an end-to-end value stream map... they were shocked at what it revealed

Value Stream Management

Are your lean initiatives being led by the right people and are they realising the true potential of lean up and down your value streams?

Competing with China

Although the lean revolution began long before the recent rise of China, they go hand in hand. Lean is as essential to Chinese firms as it is to Western ones responding to their challenge

Why Responsiveness Matters

In this presentation to the Lean Logistics Conference in Poland, Daniel Jones shows why traditional logic is not only fundamentally flawed but is also challenged by changes in consumer behaviour and competition between low cost locations

The Invisible Opportunity

In this article from the ECR Journal, Daniel Jones argues that the packaged goods industry in Europe is suffocating under a dead weight of hidden, institutionalized waste. Removing this waste could unleash huge opportunities for innovation and growth

Creating Flow in Production

Ian Glenday “It is absolutely possible to banish firefighting at the same time as increasing customer service.”

Ian Glenday, The Lean Enterprise Academy

Breaking Through to Flow

Flow

Are plans changed after being issued?

Is the prime focus of LEAN eliminating waste?

Is the accuracy of demand forecasting an issue?

Would “fire fighting” describe the way things are done?

If you answer YES to one or more of the above, this workbook is for you, your colleagues and the organisation you all work in.

2016: The Future Value Chain

In 2006, GCI produced a vision of what supply chains in 2016 might look like.

Creating a supply chain fit for 2016

These articles identify faulty and damaging logic at the very heart of today’s supply chains ...

The Magic of Levelled Scheduling

It doesn't sound very sexy, and it doesn't loom as large as other terms in the lean lexicon but in a growing number of companies it is having dramatic effects

Moving to Flow

Levelled production is an essential enabler for moving to flow and becoming truly lean

Little and Often

Making products in batches and accumulating a full load before dispatching a truck are fundamental to mass production thinking

Managing and Sustaining Lean Journeys

Daniel Jones, Chairman, Lean Enterprise Academy “Lean thinking is about creating value through streamlining horizontal processes which entails a new management system to focus lean efforts, mobilize the necessary resources and develop the problem solving capabilities of every employee”
Daniel Jones - Chairman, The Lean Enterprise Academy

Getting The Right Things Done

For companies to be competitive, leaders must engage people at all levels in order to focus their energy and enable them to apply lean principles to everything they do. Strategy deployment, called hoshin kanri by Toyota, has proven to be the most effective process for meeting this ongoing challenge.

Jumping to Solutions

We are all guilty of one of the greatest sins with lean - not having the patience to really understand the problem we are trying to solve and then jumping to a solution

What is Lean?

I am surprised how many times top managers ask me "So what is Lean?". Lean is a new business model that delivers far superior performance

The Truth about Lean

I have been studying lean for 28 years and in that time done a lot of reflecting on what works and what does not. Let me summarize my reflections on what makes a successful lean transformation

Respect for People

Jim Womack says - For years I've visited companies where respect for people is a core element of the corporate philosophy... so I've asked managers “How do you show respect?”

Process, Purpose, People

Recently Jim Womack was asked “How do we know how lean we are? What metrics should we use to measure our progress? Are we world class in terms of lean?”

Defining Value from the Consumer's perspective

Iasn Taylor "All value is the result of a process or value stream. Streamlining value streams is one of the most powerful ways to improve the performance of your organisation."

Ian Taylor, Lean Enterprise Academy

Lean Solutions

In Lean Solutions Jim Womack and Daniel Jones discover that if lean provision can be married to truly lean consumption, life can be better for consumers, more satisfying for employees, and more profitable for providers. A win-win-win is possible in which providers, employees, and consumers create lean solutions together.