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Lean Thinking and Lean Manufacturing
Management Improvement Dictionary
Lean Thinking and Lean Manufacturing Articles
Articles by James Womack -
Directory of Lean Thinking web sites
Lean Thinking and Lean Manufacturing Books
Some of our favorite articles:
A Lean Walk Through History by Jim Womack,
"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.)"
Role of Management in a Lean Manufacturing Environment by Gary Convis, Jul 2001
"Since this column is meant to link automotive engineers with lean manufacturing, I would like to share my personal experience as a mechanical engineer who started out in the traditional way of manufacturing, and along the way discovered a much better way - the Toyota Production System." Gary Convis is the President of Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky.
Going Lean in Health Care by James P. Womack et. al., 
"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."
TPS vs. Lean and the Law of Unintended Consequences by Art Smalley, Dec 2005
"In every piece of TPS literature from Toyota, this stated aim is mixed in with the twin production principles of Just in Time (make and deliver the right part, in the right amount, at the right time), and Jidoka (build in quality at the process) as well as the notion of continuous improvement by standardization and elimination of waste in all operations."
How To Compare Six Sigma, Lean and the Theory of Constraints by Dave Nave, Mar 2002 
"When you are working through the apparent conflicting claims of performance
improvement programs, my advice is to concentrate on the primary and secondary effects of their philosophies. Once the values of a specific improvement program are identified, the comparison of those values with the values of the organization can make the method of selection easier, if not obvious."
Eliminating Complexity from Work: Improving Productivity by Enhancing Quality by Tim Fuller, Aug 1985 
Redesigning a process to eliminate non-value added steps. A lean thinking example from 1985.
Teaching the Big Box New Tricks by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones, Nov 2005 
"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 leaving the store with the cola, has declined
from 20 days to five days."
The Best Factory in the World by Norman Bodek,
From his book, Kaikaku : "Pictures of areas of the factory or the office hung throughout the plant. Workers were encouraged to look at the pictures and talk about them together, then to make improvements."
Lean Software Development by Mary Poppendieck, Sep 2003 
"All lean thinking starts with a re-examination of what waste is and an aggressive campaign to eliminate it. Quite simply, anything you do that does not add value from the customer perspective is waste."
The Dramatic Spread of Lean Thinking by Jim Womack, Apr 2005 
"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."
The most recent article additions to our library on lean topics:
Cost Cutting is Much Different than Waste Removal by Jim Womack, Dec 2008
"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 cash be put aggressively in play in the financial markets? But in the current crisis, firms with stable cash reserves can keep new programs on schedule and will surge in the upturn as competitors who delay or cancel new projects fall behind."
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Lean coding by Jack Ganssle, Dec 2008
"Lean manufacturing and the quality movement showed that defects indicate a problem with the process rather than the product. Clearly, if we can minimize waste the system will be delivered faster and with higher quality.
In other words, cut bugging to shorten debugging. The best tool we have to reduce bugging is the code inspection."
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Beyond Scrum: Lean and Kanban for Game Developers by Clinton Keith, Nov 2008
Time-boxing is the first step in beginning to find a balanced flow for our value stream as visualized on our Heijunka board. However, one problem exists. Each stage of effort in the stream will require a different length time-box. This can cause gaps and pileups.
...
We have to find ways to balance this workflow smoothly so that everyone has work to do every day. One way of doing this is to balance the effort on each stage to achieve the same flow through the system.
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Steering the wrong course by Tom Southworth, Oct 2008
"Too many Lean efforts rely too heavily on classroom training and not enough on actual implementation. Just like leaders who need to get out of their chairs and out onto the floor, teams need to be taught how to do something and not simply be told how to do it. Toyota's Taiichi Ohno once said, "Understanding means doing." Learning Lean is very kinesthetic; you have to go out and actually do something in order to fully understand."
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Managing Change Requests Using Lean Methods and a Kanban Board by Eric Landes, Nov 0002
"Existing Agile techniques assume a team working on one project, not an enterprise team working on multiple applications. There is another agile way to mitigate these issues. You will explore how to use the lean artifact Kanban board to manage your software's change requests."
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Reduce Inventory and Need for Expedited Deliveries by ValuMetrix, May 2005
"The Lean team conducted a step-by-step analysis of the procurement process. After identifying causes of waste and inefficient ordering, it rearranged the supply room, making the most frequently used items more accessible. It instituted a color-coded inventory management system with all necessary information centralized on convenient reorder cards. A monitoring process is helping to identify opportunities for further gains."
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Many more good lean thinking, lean manufacturing aricles.