Lean Enterprise

Lean Enterprise is a business management system that strives to create value for our customers and deliver that value to the right place, at the right time,
in the right quantities while reducing or eliminating waste from all processes within the Value Stream.

Lean Enterprise is a collaborative effort between process suppliers, process owners and process customers, and it is successful only when all employees become part of the problem solving process. This culture of learning to continuously improve creates an atmosphere of ownership and pride that is lacking in traditional business systems.

So how do we create this learning environment?  By embracing and utilizing Lean philosophies, principles and tools.

The Lean philosophy is one of continuous improvement. In a Lean culture we always ask, "How can we execute our processes better today than we did yesterday?" And we don't stop there, but go on to ask how we can execute our processes better tomorrow than we did today.

To create this culture of increasing excellence we need to understand and put into practice the Lean Enterprise principles listed below.

Lean Enterprise principles are as follows:

• Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy even at the expense of short term gains.
• Create continuous process flow to bring problems to the surface.
• Use pull systems to avoid overproduction.
• Level the workload.
• Build a culture that stops to fix problems, to get quality right the first time.
• Standardize tasks; these are the foundation for continuous improvement.
• Use visual controls so problems are not hidden.
• Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology.
• Grow leaders who thoroughly understand, live, and teach the philosophy.
• Develop people and teams who follow the company's philosophy.
• Respect your extended network of partners and suppliers.
• Go and see for yourself to thoroughly understand the situation.
• Make decisions slowly by consensus, then implement these decisions rapidly.
• Become a learning organization through relentless reflection and continuous improvement.