Recommended by S Badri Narayana, Director – Operations Excellence, FLAME TAO Knoware
Why to read ‘Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation’?
In the book, the authors provide a thoughtful expansion upon their value-based business system based on the Toyota model. Along the way they update their action plan in light of new research and the increasing globalization of manufacturing, and they revisit some of their key case studies (most of which still derive, however, from the automotive, aerospace, and other manufacturing industries). The core of the lean model remains the same in the new edition. All businesses must define the ‘value’ that they produce as the product that best suits customers’ needs. The leaders must then identify and clarify the ‘value stream’, the nexus of actions to bring the product through problem solving, information management, and physical transformation tasks.
Excerpts: Why is it so hard to start at the right place, to correctly define value? Partly because most producers want to make what they are already making and partly because many customers only know how to ask for some variant of what they are already getting. They simply start in the wrong place and end up at the wrong destination. Then, when providers or customers do decide to rethink value, they often fall back on simple formulas – lower cost, increased product variety through customization, instant delivery – rather than jointly analysing value and challenging old definitions to see what’s really needed.
