Jim Womack

Articles

A Lean Walk Through History view details
"Once you are sensitized to the depth of lean history, along with its many advances and setbacks, it's easy to begin filling in some of the other milestones: By 1765, French general Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauval had grasped the significance of standardized designs and interchangeable parts to facilitate battlefield repairs. (Actually doing this cost-effectively in practice was another matter and required another 125 years.)"

Going Lean in Health Care view details
"Lean principles hold the promise of reducing or eliminating wasted time, money, and energy in health care, creating a system that is efficient, effective, and truly responsive to the needs of patients ? the 'customers' at the heart of it all."

The Dramatic Spread of Lean Thinking view details
"I am delighted with the spread of lean thinking far beyond the factory and far beyond the high-wage economies to every corner of the world and to every value-creating activity."

Lean Manufacturing Visionary Jim Womack On Frontiers Of Lean Thinking view details
"by bonus systems motivating sales staff to make the month or make the quarter and producing a wave of orders at the end of the reporting period. A better approach to these problems is to revamp the bonuses so they are rolling averages rather that don't e

Lean Consumption view details
"Lean production transformed manufacturing. Now it?s time to apply lean thinking to the processes of consumption. By minimizing customers? time and effort and delivering exactly what they want when and where they want it, companies can reap huge benefi

Teaching the Big Box New Tricks view details
"The consequence, in terms of performance, is remarkable. Total "touches" on the product (each of which involves costly human effort) have been reduced from 150 to 50. The total throughput time, from the filling line at the supplier to the customer leavin

From Lean Tools to Lean Management view details
"Lean tools are great. We all need to master and deploy them, and our efforts of the last 15 years to do so are not wasted. But just as a carpenter needs a vision of what to build in order to get the full benefit of a hammer, we need a clear vision of our

Machine Revisited view details
Podcast of Mark Graban interviewing Jim Womack; discussing the reissue of Machine that Changed the World: "the biggest disappointment... was to have people tell me it was a g

Why Toyota Won and How Toyota Can Lose view details
"Toyotas great risk, the way it can lose, is that its new managers and the managers in its new suppliers will revert to the old, mass-production mentality of the companies or schools they have come from. If this happens, Toyotas management performance w

State of the Auto World view details
Podcast interview by Mark Graban. "G.E. has been a 'make the numbers' company as opposed to a 'fix the company' company, says Jim. But now GE is saying they have to be like Toyota... 'is there anything beyond Six Sigma or even to Six Sigma?'"

From lean tools to lean management view details
"Teach all managers to ask questions about their value streams (rather than giving answers and orders from higher levels). Turn these questions into experiments using Plan-Do-Check-Act. Only management by science through constant experimentation to answe

Thought Leaders -- Lean On Me view details
"Toyota has a supplier management system that is still the best-in-class, and a good part of Toyota's recent quality issue has been bringing in a whole bunch of non-Toyota traditional suppliers and trying to teach them the Toyota Management System, and th

Cost Cutting is Much Different than Waste Removal view details
"As the lean transformation proceeds, convert physical inventories into cash, but keep an inventory of cash to buffer the firm during the down cycle. From the standpoint of modern financial thinking, this seems sub-optimal. Shouldn't all of the freed-up c

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Jim Womack
Lean Enterprise Institute
"We carefully develop hypotheses about lean thinking and experiment to see which approaches work best in the real world. We then write up and teach what we discover, providing new methods for organizational transformation. We strive to answer the simple question of every manager, "What can I do on Monday morning to make a difference in my organization?" And, by creating a strong Lean Community through our website and public events we try to give managers the courage to become lean change agents."

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