Research Award Recipients

Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream

Robert Martichenko and Kevin von Grabe

Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream will change the way you think about your supply chain and logistics networks.  Even better - it gives you a way to act using lean principles to transform and continuously improve these two key flows.

In this pioneering workbook, lean logistics veterans Robert Martichenko and Kevin von Grabe explain step-by-step a comprehensive, real-life implementation process for optimizing your entire fulfillment stream from raw materials to customers, including practical insights into two critical concepts: calculating the total cost of fulfillment and collaborating across all functions and firms along the fulfillment stream.

Your company, like most, probably calculates costs at different points within departments, such as the piece price paid by the purchasing department to a supplier. Few companies figure the total cost associated with each major function across the whole fulfillment stream. Calculating total cost, which most executives find surprisingly large, lets you measure the impact of your improvement efforts on operational performance and overall income.

Martichenko and von Grabe also give you guidance and tools for collaboration. Using the example company ABE Corp. as their model, the authors illustrate how the lean conversion process is a win-win for every company along the supply chain. And an accompanying analysis illustrates the financial benefits and shows you how to apply the metrics.

The narrative, supported by 41 charts and illustrations, including value-stream maps, shows you:

1. How to apply the eight guiding principles for implementing lean fulfillment, even when all the data and variables are not known.

2. The seven major types of waste in logistics and supply chains.

3. How a fulfillment-stream council of representatives from internal departments, customers, suppliers, and transportation providers gives critical guidance and support.

4. The “eight rights” for assessing perfect order execution.

5. What lean metrics to use, such as why average days on hand of inventory is a better measure than inventory turns.

6. How to identify and eliminate waste in shipping, receiving, and yard management.

Learn how to use lean management principles to convert supply chains and logistics networks into smooth, fast-flowing fulfillment streams.

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Lean Office and Service Simplified: The Definitive How-to Guide

Drew Locher

"Lean Office and Service Simplified" goes beyond the basic tools and delves into
the key concepts of Lean as they apply to office and services. Value Stream Management
will be discussed first, followed by chapters on Standard Work, Flow, Level Pull and
Visual Management. Further, each will be explored in tremendous depth and will
provide a step-by-step methodology for each. Chapter 6 will cover several of the more
important "tools" such as 5S and Mistake Proofing. These should be applied while
implementing the key concepts covered in Chapters 1 through 5 in order to maximize the
benefits.

Chapter 7 provides a function by function review of the application of lean. Does
lean apply to Sales and Marketing? How about Finance and Accounting? These are
frequently asked questions that need responses. Functions commonly found in most all
service organizations and the administrative areas of manufacturing companies are
covered. It must be noted that the examples provided in this chapter must be
implemented in the context of Value Stream Management in order to maximize the
benefits.

While the commons sense nature of lean concepts will resonate with most people,
the successful application of lean requires fundamental behavioral change in many people.
People are creatures ofhabit, and therefore, will have difficulty changing. However, they
can create new habits if sufficient time is allowed. The most common obstacles
encountered will be addressed throughout the book, along with strategies to overcome
them drawing on over twenty years of practical experience. This discussion will
culminate in Chapter 8 "Leading the Lean Organization". The hope is that the reader will
come away with the confidence to put into practice the well tested and proven
methodologies provided.

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Liquid Lean: Developing Lean Culture in the Process Industries

Raymond C. Floyd

While Lean practices have been successfully implemented into the process industry with excellent results for over 20 years (including the author’s own award winning example at Exxon Chemical), that industry has been especially slow in adopting Lean. Part of the problem is that the process industry needs its own version of Lean. The larger part of the problem is resistance to transformational change, a barrier that can only be overcome with effective leadership and results-oriented planning that engages rather than excludes all stakeholders.

Written by Raymond Floyd, an unparalleled leader of Lean transformations, Liquid Lean: Developing Lean Culture in the Process Industries provides potential process industry change agents with the no-nonsense guide needed to eliminate waste and achieve sustainable optimal efficiency.  Presenting lessons in lean as they apply within the liquid industries, the book focuses on developing the four measures of Lean as defined by the Shingo Award:

1. Business Results

2. Consistent Lean Enterprise Culture

3. Continuous Process Improvement

4. Cultural Enablers

Illustrated with his own success stories, Floyd describes business results, Lean enterprise thinking, and policy deployment in process industry terms. He offers detailed theory, practice, and examples of continuous process improvement, and describes the leadership and defines the ethics needed to evolve and sustain Lean transformation. Floyd lays out the specific steps needed during the first six months of transformation and the benchmarks to be achieved during the first two years of implementation. All companies can benefit from Lean; this book makes sure that those who want it, know how.

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The Remedy: Bringing Lean Thinking Out of the Factory to Transform the Entire Organization

Pascal Dennis

This work has an extremely widespread application as the tools, techniques, and methods described are at a level that achieves the goals of Lean and operational excellence without tying them down to a specific industry or work stream. The book provides practical knowledge for lean champions, managers, and executives driving toward operational excellence enterprise-wide. The story format, and the presentation of this material was excellent, and the avoidance of lean and operational excellence jargon gives the book a wide appeal…it is a pleasure to read.

The Remedy is a compelling a business fable that shows how Lean quality improvement business practices—traditionally associated with manufacturing--can dramatically improve the service areas of your business-including design, engineering, sales, marketing and all processes in between.

Written by Pascal Dennis, a leading Lean consultant, the story follows Tom Pappas and Rachel Armstrong, senior leaders at a desperate automotive company as they try to implement a Lean management system across an entire platform, the Chloe, a breakthrough "green" car. The future of the company is at stake. Can Tom and Rachel, supported by Andy Saito, a retired, reclusive Toyota executive, regain the trust and respect of the customer? Can a venerable but dying company implement Lean practices to every part of their business and learn a new, more effective way of managing?

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Transforming Health Care: Virginia Mason Medical Center’s Pursuit of the Perfect Patient Experience

Charles Kenney

The Virginia Mason Productions System is based on the Toyota Production System, a manufacturing approach Toyota has used for more than 50 years.  Like Toyota, Virginia Mason’s experience is truly a journey in continuous improvement.  This book represents a snapshot in time describing Virginia Mason’s place on that path.  Applying the manufacturing methodology to health care is difficult and, by its nature, evolves on a daily basis.  Today, a visitor to Virginia Mason may see processes or work flows that are different than what is described in this book.  Some improvements, in fact, have not been spread to all corners of the organization.  Other improvements may not have been sustained simply because change is hard, and it takes people to ensure it is maintained.  However, through a culture characterized by the rigorous and consistent application of the tools and methods of VMPS, all processes and work flows ultimately will be more efficient, resulting in higher quality care and improved patient safety.

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Work That Makes Sense: Operator-Led Visuality

Dr. Gwendolyn D. Galsworth

Work That Makes Sense is Gwendolyn Galsworth's eagerly-awaited book on how to implement, coach, support, and sustain visual inventiveness on the operator-level. The result? A 15% to 30% gain in productivity and a spirited, engaged, and aligned work culture.

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Toast: Value Stream Mapping Video

GBMP

In 2004, GBMP released Toast Kaizen, a short video to demonstrate the importance of direct observation in continuous improvement. It is now used around the world (in 14 languages) to help explain the true meaning of Kaizen. In reality, as viewers observe the 2004 toast-making process, they are witnessing an already improved process, one where much Muda, Mura and Muri have already been remove as the modern-day kitchen is fairly well organized already. But this is not so in most other endeavors.

According to Bruce Hamilton (the Toast Guy), “If our kitchens were organized the same way as our factories, offices and clinics, then the refrigerator would be in basement, the toaster would be in the attic and the bread would be stored anywhere there was an open space. We would be making huge batches of toast that spent most of their existence being moved and stored. And we’d see isolated departments that each added a little bit of value and a whole lot of waste, working out of sync, rarely communicating and often displeasing the customer.. Just like most business environments”

So, watching "Toast Kaizen", it’s easy to separate the wastes from the work, and in doing so make the whole job easier, better, faster and cheaper. But what if the process is not self-contained as in a kitchen. What if the process is laid out like most factories and offices? Then those material, information and production flows would be spread out all over into functional areas that would hide most of the waste. In fact, almost none of us see the whole process in our daily work, just the little piece we do ourselves. So now, GBMP offers "Toast VSM", a 2009 sequel to the original - a DVD no Lean Training Library should be without.

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Follow the Learner
Dr. Sami Bahri
Lean Enterprise Institute

In his book, Follow the Learner: The Role of a Leader in Creating a Lean Culture, Dr. Sami Bahri describes how he and the staff in his dental practice tackled each of these questions. The book describes how their organization, the Bahri Dental Group, transformed their work and their thinking from a traditional batch-and-queue approach to one focused directly on the needs of the patient, not on the needs of the practitioners. The purpose of Follow the Leader is to present a picture of how any organization can build a culture based on lean principles and tools. Why tell a story about a dental practice? First, everyone has been to the dentist. Every reader has a common frame of reference and therefore has experienced the processes and problems Dr. Bahri describes. Second, he happens to be one of the most dedicated and knowledgeable lean thinkers and practitioners in any field. Follow the Learner provides a glimpse into what it means to become a lean learning organization and a leadership model for continuously improving it. People at all levels of lean experience in any type of organization will be able to read this book and better understand the
universal application of both lean methods and leadership practices.

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The Lean Manager
Michael and Freddy Ballé
Lean Enterprise Institute

The Lean Manager: A Novel of Lean Transformation reveals how individuals can go beyond the short-term gains from tools and realize a deeper, sustainable path of improvement. The Lean Manager, the sequel to the Balles' international best-selling business novel The Gold Mine, tells the compelling story of plant manager Andrew Ward as he goes through the challenging but rewarding journey to becoming a lean manager. Ward learns to use a deep understanding of lean tools, as well as a technical know-how of his plant's operations, to foster a lean attitude that sustains continuous improvement. Ward moves beyond fluency with tools to changing his behavior as a manager and leader. He shifts from giving orders and answers to asking the right questions so people identify and address problems. He learns how to use tools to unleash the creativity and motivation of people, so they learn how to solve problems as well as coach and teach others to solve problems. Ward learns how to create lean managers.

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Lean Enablers for Systems Engineering
Bohdan W. Oppenheim, Earll M. Murrnan, Deborah A. Secor
Loyola Marymount University | LA

Systems Engineering (SE) is regarded as a sound practice but often burdened with waste, as documented in recent NASA, Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Department of Defense (DoD) studies. Lean thinking is the holistic work system credited for the extraordinary rise of Toyota. Lean thinking has been successfully applied in many work fields such as general manufacturing, aerospace. engineering, healthcare, service industries. The emerging field of Lean Systems Engineering (LSE) is the application of lean principles, practices and tools to SE and to the related aspects of enterprise management (EM) in order to enhance the delivery of value (which is defined as flawless delivery of product or mission with satisfaction of all stakeholders) while reducing waste.This paper contains four parts: 1) Historical background of the new field of LSE and a review of the fundamental concepts of Lean Thinking. 2) The development process of a new product called "Lean Enablers for Systems Engineering." 3) A list of the Enablers organized into six Lean principles. 4) Summary and conclusions. The Lean Enablers for Systems Engineering is a comprehensive checklist of 194 non-mandatory practices and recommendations forillulated as "do's" and "don'ts" of SE and containing tacit knowledge (collective wisdom) on how to prepare for, plan, execute, and practice SE and EM using lean thinking.

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Breaking Through To Flow
Ian Glenday
Lean Enterprise Academy

Breaking Through to Flow helps practitioners go beyond the fire-fighting associated with constant change. There is a lot more to lean than simply eliminating waste from current processes. This workbook introduces a new pathway that is helping many organizations overcome this hurdle and launch them on to the next phase of their lean journey – breaking through to flow. The workbook describes how it is possible to move step-by-step toward leveled production and later on to produce in-line with customer demand. Breaking Through to Flow also introduces a tool and management system, called the Glenday Sieve, which enables organizations to quickly create a stable flow and replenishment pull system for the few products that account for a significant part of their output, while managing separately the tail of build-to-order products with low volume and unpredictable demand. This pathway will help people make a fundamental change in their thinking and working that is at the heart of lean – moving from batch to flow logic.

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Creating Lean Dealers
David Brunt and John Kiff
Lean Enterprise Academy

Car manufacturing has been transformed by lean over the last 20 years, yet car dealerships have remained virtually untouched - until now. Dealerships experimenting with lean are now experiencing a doubling of throughput, increases in productivity of 50 percent or more, and returns on sales several times the industry norm. Creating Lean Dealers is a step-by-step guide to improving dealer operations, starting from service and repair. With detailed instructions it illustrates how to create visual images to help remove the many barriers to the smooth flow of work in your dealership. This workbook is the result of almost 10 years' research and practical experience with pioneering dealers of all sizes and franchises across Europe. Creating Lean Dealers shows how lean can deliver a step-change improvement across your business in customer fulfillment, involvement and commitment of staff, and returns for shareholders - all without major investment in IT, staff numbers, plant, machinery, or buildings.

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Kaizen Event Fieldbook: Foundation, Framework, and Standard Work for Effective Events
Mark R. Hamel
Society of Manufacturing Engineers

Kaizen event effectiveness is a prerequisite for lean transformation success. It provides the necessary transformational jump-start, momentum, organizational learning and engagement, and sustainable, step-function improvements. The systemic use of kaizen events establishes the technical and cultural foundation for principle-driven kaizen - the powerful combination of kaizen events and daily kaizen activities. The Kaizen Event Fieldbook brings this all together as an indispensable reference for lean leaders and implementers within any industry and for use at any stage within the lean implementation journey. One of lean's defining characteristics is learning by seeing, doing, and studying. In context with lean theory and lean leadership principles, readers will gain an understanding of the essential "whys" and "hows" of kaizen event standard work and event management, as well as a proven means to sustain the gains. The fieldbook's multi-phase approach addresses strategy, pre-event planning, execution, and follow-through. Practical examples, over 100 figures and tables and many real-life gemba tales provide for an enriched learning experience.

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