Little Lean Guide for the Use of Managers

Roche Cécile

Description

In a world of permanent crisis, where change is the norm, Lean becomes fashionable. Yet, companies who have chosen to fundamentally transform itself, following the Lean principles and investing first on women and men, have, globally, and in the long term, the best economic results. This book, with simple concepts and illustrated with many examples, analyzes the main misconceptions about Lean, taking each time the views of managers and operational concerned. (Version anglaise de Petit guide Lean à l'usage des managers).

Sujets

• entreprises
• Gestion
• Management

Informations

• Publié par: L'Harmattan
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 20
• EAN13: 9782336375748
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

COVER
BACKCOVER
COLLECTION LEAN MANAGEMENT
Collection Lean Management Collection directed by Richard Kaminski (Institut Lean France)
We can choose to succeed… if we find the right path to development : everyone wants successful, pleasant, useful and affordable products. How can we focus everyone’s energies and initiatives to create innovative products and services ?
The promise that lean management makes is to combine satisfaction (of customers, employees and partners) and growth (of the company and of people).
This collection aims to recount field experience and observations made by managing directors of companies who are engaged in real lean.
TITLE
Cécile Roche






A LITTLE LEAN GUIDE FOR THE USE OF MANAGERS



Foreword by Jacques Chaize










L’Harmattan
COPYRIGHT





















© L’Harmattan, 2015
5-7, rue de l’École-Polytechnique ; 75005 Paris
http://www.harmattan.fr
[e-mail]
[e-mail]
EAN Epub : 978-2-336-72585-7
To Monique and Daniel, who have always known that the important thing is learning to learn.
CONTENTS
CONTENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
LEAN ASSUMPTIONS
THE PRINCIPLES OF LEAN
LEAN IS A SYSTEM
A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY
SOME REFERENCES
THE MANAGERIAL PRINCIPLES OF LEAN
MURI, MURA, MUDA : WASTE FROM THE LEAN PERSPECTIVE
LEAN : CHOOSING PRIORITIES
COMPETITIVENESS BY EXCELLENCE
LEAN AND FINANCE
RESULTS ?
SOME PITFALLS OF LEAN
LEAN COACHES
LEAN : AN INDIVIDUAL APPROACH ?
FACTSHEETS : SOME DEFINITIONS
FLOW MANAGEMENT
VISUAL MANAGEMENT
THE STRATEGY/FIELD ACTION LOOP
PRACTICAL IMPLEMENTATION OF KAIZEN
TO CONCLUDE : LEAN IN YOUR COMPANY ?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PREFACE
« Lean » is attracting more and more interest. Its agility and rigour have stood up to the vagaries of fashion and seem to correspond to the uncertainties and challenges of today.
But those who are not in the know are often confused by its jargon or misled by the deceptive simplicity of the tools ; they are also victims of misconceptions and prejudice, perpetuated by those who have not taken the plunge, or those who have tried without success. Some say « lean is just common sense » ; others call it a « stress factor » ; still others evoke resistance from local managers. « It’s hard to keep up, » concludes a fourth.
Furthermore, books on lean often fall into one of two extremes : some authors, taking the lean approach for granted, engage in excessively detailed presentations that discourage the reader. Others stick to the theory, describing the challenges, systems and postures but leaving readers in the lurch if they want advice about how to put it into practice.
Here is a book that never loses sight of the purpose and goals of lean and is able to bring together and connect all its strategic and operational dimensions clearly and pragmatically. This is the author’s first merit : Cécile Roche is a lean practitioner of long standing who is today helping her company, a world leader in the high tech sector, on the way to lean management. She writes of her experience and describes it with simplicity and elegance. Taking stock of the preconceived ideas she has encountered, she points out the pitfalls that lead to failure and highlights the essential factors that build success, and she does this without unnecessary jargon and tedious details.
As a statement of the obvious that is too often forgotten, she reminds us that lean is primarily a growth approach that places customer satisfaction at the heart of the company. « Quality is when the customer comes back, not the product ».
And because this growth involves the development of people, at the end of each chapter she shows the challenges and benefits of lean for the manager, and also for his co-workers : « with lean, the commitment is individual but the result is collective ».
Finally, to the classic but unavoidable question « Where to start ? And how ? » Cécile Roche responds with a course for progress in a few interdependent steps, reminding us that lean is a system, not a toolkit or a list of independent projects.
This book will help managers and their staff who want to engage in a long-term lean approach to understand the discussions that will guide their first steps.
Those of us who are continuing their lean approach will discover in this sharing of a long experience further pitfalls to be avoided, the best approaches and the right balance to be struck.
For everyone, it is a book that flows easily, rich in unforgettable key phrases.
Jacques Chaize, September 2013
INTRODUCTION
I have run training courses for many executive committees in companies where the word « lean » was not something new. Each time, I began by asking managers to tell me what lean meant for them. Each time I heard : « doing more with less », « eliminating waste », « involving people », « it’s common sense », « we were doing it without knowing, before it had a name ». Much more rarely, people spoke about the customer… and almost never about strategy or vision.
Lean has many paradoxes, some apparent, others not. How can we become more agile, more flexible and more rigorous ? How can we make room for creativity when everyone is talking about standardizing ? What about managers who think that lean means « bottom-up », but at the same time remain convinced that a good manager is one who provides solutions ? Or when you see that it is so difficult to carry out actions that seem full of common sense with everyone on a daily basis ?
I often reply that it seems unlikely that you are engaged in lean without realising it because the effort that this requires day after day is probably too great for that.
When you work in a large company, there are often many layers between top management, company management and operational staff. And very often, local managers are accused of sabotaging every attempt to progress. « Resistant to change » and « overwhelmed by daily preoccupations, » they are thought to be the biggest obstacle to introducing improvement on a daily basis. Maybe ! I have seen that staff and their direct managers often outpace directors who have delegated lean to them but have not bothered to be lean themselves !
« The question is not to do lean, but to become lean » (Oreste Fiume).
No book will ever be enough to achieve a lean approach. First of all because there is no sacred book about lean, one that you would just have to apply to the letter for a guaranteed result. Lean is not a standard, and that’s a good thing, because that’s what makes it powerful.
I see lean rather as a continuous learning method. You don’t learn to swim in a book ! You have to get into the water. River, lake, sea, swimming pool, bathtub ? They are not at all the same thing, but it’s always about moving through water while remaining at the surface.
And yet there are many very good books on lean, each giving a different perspective on the subject. The situation doesn’t change but the location and power of the lamp does.
Lean is above all a learning process that uses principles that have been validated over a long period and tools appropriate for the situation, context and purpose. Through problem solving, everyone can grow each day by expanding his or her skills to see, accept, prioritize and solve problems as a team.
Managers should help teams select the « right » problems, those that are at some point and in a given context on the path towards efficiency and strategy for the company.
LEAN ASSUMPTIONS
Lean is based on two fundamental assumptions underlying all the practices, methods and tools attached to it. Attempting to progress through lean means accepting these two assumptions.
Assumption n°1 : « A fully satisfied customer will help us grow »
The notion of satisfaction is used in the conventional marketing sense : only fully satisfied customers come back. The others are just satisfied, but will not hesitate to go off to the highest bidder. This assumption implies that one is seeking above all to keep and develop one’s customers, and it is from this « customer platform » and the reputation attached to it, that one sets out to move onto new markets. The vector chosen by lean to achieve this total satisfaction is above all the quality of our products (services or systems), the goal being always to improve the added value for the customer.
Lean is therefore primarily a growth process.
One of the first preconceived ideas is to think that lean is a deletion process : it reduces waste, reduces inventory, gets rid of down-time, etc. There is a confusion between ends and means. The first objective is to create more added value for the customer. The removal of waste frees up time and resource to increase this added value. To simplify, value added for the customer is what he buys. The customer is looking for an answer to a particular problem. Whatever he pays for that provides no direct answer to this problem can be considered as Non-Value-Added. This is not a judgement of the intrinsic value of an activity but rather a definition related to the customer’s expectations (expressed or not).