Books

A groundbreaking and revolutionary book that will transform how lean is understood practiced and used within organizations. Lean Strategy is about gaining a competitive edge by offering better quality products at competitive prices and making a sustainable profit by eliminating waste through engaging employees in discovering deeper ways to think about their own jobs and smarter ways of working together. In its current form lean has been radically effective but its true powers have yet to be harnessed. This book takes lean and transforms it from a management technique into an overarching strategy. Lean Strategy delivers a new way of creating value from lean.

Written by experts in the field this enlightening book will change the conversation that business leaders have about the nature of strategic advantage from one of optimization to one of learning innovation and growth. The authors address popular misconceptions about the basics of lean/TPS showing the true purpose of tools methods and attitudes that leverage the intelligence of every employee doing the work. Leaders and managers will learn how to think – and then act – differently tapping the power of every person in their organization in a disciplined manner that generates unparalleled sustainable success that is responsive to today’s most pressing challenges.

What should you do first when starting to implement Lean manufacturing? What comes next, then next? With the raft of information now available about Lean principles, it’s easy to get confused.

Kaizen Express clarifies the process using a rapid, nonstop style to explain the essential elements of the Toyota Production System (TPS) in a logical implementation sequence.

This succinct but comprehensive back-to-basics book offers Lean novices and veterans alike a comprehensive primer on Lean principles and implementation that returns to fundamentals and stresses the importance of learning by doing at the individual and team levels.

“It’s easy to forget the fundamentals while pursuing advanced methods,” writes Jim Womack, LEI founder and chairman, in the Foreword. “I constantly encounter firms focusing on high-level issues of Lean management, strategy, and corporate culture that have completely ignored creating a solid foundation at the level where the real work is done.”

Originally developed as an aid for teaching the essential elements of TPS to Japanese readers and non-Japanese readers working together at Japanese factories around the world, Kaizen Express keeps the bilingual format. It also preserves the illustrations or charts on every page that reinforce key points.

The book also includes a glossary of TPS terms in English and Japanese and a set of standard forms used to implement TPS at production sites.

This book covers topics on:

• Lean Manufacturing
• Lean Service
• Lean Tools and Techniques

Beyond Heroes explains how the ThedaCare Health System, based in Northeast Wisconsin, transformed their culture by redesigning their system of daily management.

Hospitals have long relied on heroics to save the day – on one brilliant nurse or physician to fix the problem at hand. The result is a lot of people rowing in opposite directions, putting safety and quality at risk while increasing costs. This is the story of an organization breaking that habit.

Beyond Heroes shows the reader, step by step, how ThedaCare teams developed their management system, using the stories of its doctors, nurses and administrators to illustrate. The book explores each of the eight essential components of the lean system:

• Team Huddles
• Managing to Established Standards
• Problem Solving
• Transparency
• Advisory Teams
• Scorecards
• Standard Work for Leaders
• Physician’s role in a Business Performance System

What you will learn about a lean management system:

• Create and sustain a system of continuous improvement aligned with strategic goals
• Cascade information effectively throughout the organization
• Implement a system where employee coaching and mentoring can occur on a daily basis
• Build standard work for executives in gemba to support daily continuous improvement

Dan Jones’ Latest Publication

Creating Lean Dealers is a DIY guide to enable dealers to achieve such a step-change for themselves. It works through, using examples, diagrams and detailed instructions, how to transform performance in service and repair. Then it goes on to describe how the same logic can be applied to all other areas of the dealer business to give a win-win-win for customers, dealer staff and shareholders.

The journey to becoming a Lean dealer begins by getting a real understanding of two things:

The ability of the processes in the dealership to deliver right first time on time at every step – a measure that authors David Brunt and John Kiff call ‘Customer Fulfilment’ because it is the core of what customers value.

The actual demand on those processes and separating it into different types.

The next step is to use these measures, together with a map of the ‘current state’ of the process, to define and prioritise what the problems are and then address them, with the teams who do the work, in a structured way using the Plan-Do-Check-Act method of improvement.

A series of questions then guides the dealer to develop a ‘future state’ map of the process – a picture of what the process will look like, typically in 6 months time, when the problems have been addressed and some of the wastes eliminated so that more of the time is spent creating the value that customers want – what Lean thinkers call ‘Flow’. An accompanying action plan lists the ‘bite-sized steps’ needed to achieve the transformation.