Agile practices travel full circle   by Tony Baer,  
"Specifically, while lean manufacturing allows you to have a long range forecast for inventory requirements and demand, it forces to you to work with only enough stock to fill firm orders that are in the short-term pipeline. Likewise, agile software development allows you to have high-level requirements and roadmaps for a software project, but only gets specific with 'stories' that are developed for each iteration, or sprint."
 

Role of Management in a Lean Manufacturing Environment   by Gary Convis,  
"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."
 

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.)"
 

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,  
"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, 
"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,   
"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, 
"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, 
"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,
"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:
 

Reduce Inventory and Need for Expedited Deliveries   by ValuMetrix,    
"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."
 

Better Patient Care Using Lean Thinking   by ValuMetrix,  
"Lean is not just about better ROI; it's actually fundamentally about better patient care....the end result is, if you improve quality your costs will go down. If you focus on patient quality and safety, you just can't go wrong. The idea is, you do the right thing with regard to quality and the costs will take care of themselves..."
 

The Role of Leadership in Software Development   by Mary Poppendieck, 
"In this 90-minute talk from the Agile2007 conference, Lean software thought leader Mary Poppendieck reviewed 20th century management theories, including Toyota and Deming, and went on to talk about 'the matrix problem', alignment, waste cutting, planning and standards. She closed by addressing the role of measurement: 'cash flow thinking' over 'balance sheet thinking'."
 

Thought Leaders -- Lean On Me   by Jim Womack,   
"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 they're struggling because it turns out -- and I should know this better than anybody, it's what I've been doing for the last 20 years -- it's hard to get people to change old ways of thinking." This interview includes many other great insights."
 

Bringing Lean Principles to Service Industries   by Julia Hanna, 
"In their research, Staats and Upton document how the use of lean principles affected the workflow at Wipro. The concept of 'kaizen,' or continuous improvement, for example, resulted in a more iterative approach to software development projects versus a sequential, "waterfall" method in which each step of the process is completed in turn by a separate worker."