Is Lean Management for Everyone?

Is Lean Management suitable for your organization? I have done so many Lean implementation for different companies coming from different industry in both manufacturing & service, and I can say that they are successfully implemented & also help these companies to perform better. But, for Lean to really successful, the most important factor is that the top management of the management understand the potentials of Lean and work with his teams to implement Lean.

I have one CEO that involves himself in driving Lean in his organization and with his effort his organization is able to really transform itself. Within a short period of time (less than 2 weeks), the company has already enjoying improvement and also staff performance improvement.

A lot of people just consider Lean as a set of tools and forget the real objectives of Lean. Taiichi Ohno, who is one of the key driver of developing Toyota Production System (TPS), said “All we are doing is looking at the time line from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point whenwe collect the cash. And we are reducing that time line by removing the non-value-added wastes.” This is the real purpose of Lean.

Why Toyota is So Successful?

While reviewing my Lean Management talk in Mauritius for Africa expo tomorrow on How do we model the success of Toyota. There are 4Ps that have been emphasized by Toyota but when others try to learn from Toyota they merely see the surface of implementing their process improvement & problem solving tools without realize the importance of the other 2Ps which are people & philosophy which are the driving forces behind Toyota’s success. You can read about the details in The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker.

A Lean Nation/ Country

It’s been almost 7 months since I last visited Mauritius. I just can’t wait to be able to meet my friends over there. This is a nation that has previously embark on Gemba Kaizen journey and since last year I have been working with one of the government body to promote Lean Management to all the enterprises in Mauritius.

On 29 Jun 2007, this Friday, I’ll be presenting Lean to not only Mauritian but also enterprises from other African nation. I am really proud that the government realize the importance of getting the enterprises in this country lean so that they can gain the competitive edge over other nations. And, I believe Mauritius is the first nation that is embarking on becoming a Lean Nation.

I am delighted to be able to work with this nation to get them to be more productive and at the same time enjoy the beautiful Mauritius island. Here’s the photo I took from Flic En Flac, one of the nicest beach that I love. By the way, if any of you interested in visit Mauritius, I have a good friend who always take me around the island to show you beautiful beaches, waterfalls, good restaurants and many, please write to me at acheah@yahoo.com so that I can recommend him to you. Check out the beautiful Mauritius beach picture that I took.

If you like to know more on the work that I have done in Mauritius, you can refer to http://leanadvisors.com/Lean/articles/sofap.cfm .

Welcome to the Business Improvement Tips and Ideas Blog!

Welcome to Business Improvement Tips and Ideas Blog! The purpose of this blog is to share my ideas and tips mainly from my consulting experience so that we, from the management field, can learn from each other to improve ourselves, businesses, management and companies.

Due to my extensive traveling, I’ll try to do my best to update this blog and also due to my expertise in Lean Management or Lean Manufacturing so I’ll be sharing a lot of topic related to that which I’ve personally seen Lean works for a lot of organizations. If any of you have something related to leadership, management or business improvement, please do not hesitate to share or give your comments. With this, we will make this blog a better place or a reference point to help us improve ourselves. Thanks.