As economists make multiple predictions about the shape of the recession and business media begin to anticipate a coming upturn, business leaders across the UK and Europe are still focused on cutting costs to ensure they survive the recession. It is with this in mind that Staying Lean, the new Shingo-prize winning guide offers business leaders an in-depth understanding of Lean Thinking.
Based on a case study of Cogent Power, a global electric utilities manufacturer, Staying Lean offers readers an overview of how to create a Lean culture within an organisation – the key to sustaining and creating value through Lean over the long-term. Leadership, people management, and process-optimisation are three of the core management topics the book’s authors explore.
Increasing profitability and eliminating waste isn't easy -- and it's even more difficult to do on a sustainable basis if you haven’t built Lean Thinking into all of your organisation’s values and processes. Consultants from S A Partners, Europe’s longest established Lean Enterprise consultancy, and researchers from Cardiff University have received a Shingo Prize for their newest title – Staying Lean: Thriving, Not Just Surviving.
Known as the Nobel Prize of Manufacturing, the Shingo Prize is an award administered by the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University to recognise organisations and research projects from around the globe that promote awareness of Lean concepts and achieve world-class operational excellence status.
The first entirely European project to receive a Shingo Prize for excellence in Lean research, Staying Lean was co-authored by three S A Partners consultants - chairman professor Peter Hines, and managing consultants, Richard Harrison and Gary Griffiths - and Dr. Pauline Found, a senior researcher at Cardiff University’s Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre.
Peter comments on the insights Staying Lean can offer businesses interested in creating a sustainable culture of continuous improvement: “Despite often promising early results, the research shows that at least 50% of business improvement programmes are deemed to fail over the longer term and up to 70% fail to achieve all of their intended benefits. We wrote Staying Lean to illustrate how without improving the ‘below the waterline’ company culture and behaviours, no amount of Lean tools and techniques will be able to achieve sustainable performance improvements.
Cogent’s story is a surprisingly common one – which I see play itself out across a variety of industries and disciplines. In Staying Lean, we address the often invisible, and hard to copy, elements common to all successful Lean organisations: Strategy and Alignment, Leadership, Behaviour and Engagement.”
Staying Lean is a practical workbook to help business managers consider all the elements they need to address when implementing lean thinking in their organisations. Key topics include:
- Going Lean and Staying Lean
-Strategy and Alignment
- Lean Leadership
- Behaviour and Engagement
- Route to Lean
Published by Cardiff University’s Lean Enterprise Research Centre, Staying Lean is available through S A Partners’ website at: http://www.sapartners.com/content/view/107/95/lang,/
