Leading and Managing the Lean Management Process

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The underlying concept of Leading and Managing the Lean Management Process is a customer-driven philosophy for organization-wide continuous or ongoing improvement and waste elimination. Improvement and waste elimination efforts have often been referred to as kaizen. Kaizen roughly translates as good (zen) change (kai). Kaizen is a learning approach based largely on evaluating past experiences through questioning and observation. Following a Lean Management philosophy, all activities should eventually lead to enhancing customer value. If activities do not enhance customer value, they should be eliminated.

Whether the setting is manufacturing, service, administrative, health care, education, politics, or something else, it ...