What is Lean Manufacturing?
Lean manufacturing aims to eliminate waste, which is one of the worst things that can happen to any business. By failing to fully utilize all of your resources, you will lose efficiency and, as a result, productivity will suffer. Everything from manufacturing project management tools to staff employees’ expertise is among the items that have been overlooked.
Of course, there is a lot of waste in the industry. Whether it’s idle personnel or useless materials that can’t be recycled or repurposed, the outcome is the same: output is hampered. The concept of lean as a management strategy arose from this stress on eliminating waste.
Called lean manufacturing or lean production, the truth is that the lessons learned from this methodology can be universally applied. Lean manufacturing principles can help your business processes gain efficiencies and, as a result, become more effective and competitive in any marketplace.
Best 10 Lean Manufacturing Books
Today, practically every subject can be found in a vast number of books, and Lean Management is no exception. These books should be mandatory reading for all lean manufacturers, whether you’re just getting started with lean manufacturing or are a seasoned pro. What we’ve attempted to accomplish here is compile a list of ten of the greatest Lean Management books that focus on the core principles and ideas of the discipline.
These works are intended for a general audience interested in change management, company improvement, and management.
This selection of the top 10 Best Management Books covers the traditional Lean Manufacturing plus Lean in Service, Lean Strategy, Lean Startup, and how applicable Lean is in today’s society from a Leadership and overall management perspective.
Following in the tradition of its Shingo Prize-winning predecessors, Lean Production Simplified, Third Edition gives a clear overview of the structure and tools of the Lean production system. Written for the practitioner by a practitioner, it delivers a comprehensive insider’s view of Lean management.
The author helps readers grasp the system as a whole, as well as the factors that animate it, by organizing the book around an image of a house of Lean production. Illustrating the eight kinds of waste, this updated edition of a bestseller:
- Describes the craft and mass production systems that preceded Lean production―including the contributions of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford
- Explains the concepts of visual management, Five S, and Total Productive Maintenance
- Addresses just-in-time delivery of parts and products
- Examines the jidoka principle
- Covers the nervous system of Lean management, hoshin planning
- Illustrates the culture of Lean management
The Toyota Way, explain’s Toyota’s unique approach to Lean–the 14 management principles and philosophy that drive Toyota’s quality and efficiency-obsessed culture. You’ll gain valuable insights that can be applied to any organization and any business process, whether in services or manufacturing. Professor Jeffrey Liker has been studying Toyota for twenty years, and was given unprecedented access to Toyota executives, employees and factories, both in Japan and the United States, for this landmark work. The book is full of examples of the 14 fundamental principles at work in the Toyota culture, and how these principles create a culture of continuous learning and improvement. You’ll discover how the right combination of long-term philosophy, process, people, and problem solving can transform your organization into a Lean, learning enterprise–the Toyota Way.
A new paperback reissue of the classic, internationally bestselling book that first articulated the principles of lean production, with a new foreword by the authors.
This game-changing book puts you behind the curtain at Toyota, providing new insight into the legendary automaker’s management practices and offering practical guidance for leading and developing people in a way that makes the best use of their brainpower.
Drawing on six years of research into Toyota’s employee-management routines, Toyota Kata examines and elucidates, for the first time, the company’s organizational routines–called kata–that power its success with continuous improvement and adaptation. The book also reaches beyond Toyota to explain issues of human behavior in organizations and provide specific answers to questions such as:
- How can we make improvement and adaptation part of everyday work throughout the organization?
- How can we develop and utilize the capability of everyone in the organization to repeatedly work toward and achieve new levels of performance?
- How can we give an organization the power to handle dynamic, unpredictable situations and keep satisfying customers?
The first of its kind—a Value Stream Mapping book written for those in service and office environments who need to streamline operations Value Stream Mapping is a practical, how-to guide that helps decision-makers improve value stream efficiency in virtually any setting, including construction, energy, financial service, government, healthcare, R&D, retail, and technology. It gives you the tools to address a wider range of important VSM issues than any other such book, including the psychology of change, leadership, creating teams, building consensus, and charter development.
Written by Masaaki Imai, pioneer of modern business operational excellence and founder of the Kaizen Institute, Gemba Kaizen, Second Edition is anin-depth revision of this renowned, best-selling work. The book reveals how to implement cost-effective, incremental improvements in your most critical business processes. Global case studies from a wide range of industries demonstrate how gemba kaizen has been successfully used to:
- Maximize capacity and reduce inventory at Unga Limited, one of Kenya’s largest flour-milling operations
- Change the IT culture at Achmea, a large European insurance firm
- Exceed customer expectations at Walt Disney World in the United States
- Improve quality at Inoue Hospital in Japan
- Transform retail processes at Sonae MC, Portugal’s largest employer
- Practice daily kaizen at Tork Ledervin, a weaving plant in Brazil
- Stamp out muda at Sunclipse, an industrial packaging distributor in the United States
- Manage quality improvement by total workforce involvement at Xuji Group Corporation, an electrical manufacturer in China
- Implement gemba kaizen at many other companies worldwide
Described by fortune as a ‘Guru to industry’ And by businesses as a ‘genius’, eliyahu M. Goldratt was an internationally recognized leader in the development of new business management concepts and systems. This 20th anniversary edition includes a series of detailed case study interviews by David whitford, editor at large, fortune small business, which explore how organizations around the world have been transformed by Eli goldratt’s ideas.the story of Alex’s fight to save his plant contains a serious message for all managers in industry and explains the ideas which underline the theory of constraints (toc) developed by Eli goldratt. Written in a fast-paced thriller style, the goal is the gripping novel which is transforming management thinking throughout the Western world. It is a book to recommend to your friends in industry – even to your bosses – but not to your competitors!.
The authors claim to show how lean thinking with a new definition of value can breathe life into a company or economic activity, doubling productivity and sales whilst stabilizing employment, by providing a step by step plan based on in depth studies
A POWERFUL GUIDE to help you establish a culture of defect prevention by idea creation and team engagement. It shows how the habit of Mistake-Proofing can be inculcated into the DNA of the organization. Drawing upon several years of research and hands-on experience at various companies. Filled with more than 100 explicit EXAMPLEScollected from diverse companies and day to day life, organized into a coherent framework of practical concepts that can be applied by managers both at Manufacturing and Service environment
Mistake-Proofing for Operators includes the instructional features that are the signature of the Shopfloor Series. In this series Productivity Press has taken the lead in adult education by teaming with instructional designers to develop complete programs for frontline learning. The goal: to place powerful and proven improvement tools such as ZQC and mistake-proofing in the hands of your company’s entire workforce.
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