About the Centre

LERC is one of the Business School's major research centres, with around 20 staff and a track record of innovative Research, Executive Education and Innovation & Engagement activities. It was founded by Professor Peter Hines and Daniel T Jones in 1994. The centre is part of the Business School's Logistics and Operations Management (LOM) section and is a contributor to the EPSRC Cardiff University Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre.

Aims and Mission

Our mission is to be a world class lean thinking and supply chain research centre, dedicated to:

• Developing a greater understanding of lean thinking
• Developing pioneering, leading-edge lean thinking research tools and techniques
• Helping organisations achieve world class performance through the application of lean thinking principles and techniques
• Disseminating lean thinking knowledge through a broad range of education programmes and executive courses and through communicating to the broader management population

What is Lean Thinking?

The term ‘lean’ was popularised in the seminal book ‘The Machine that Changed the World’ , which clearly illustrated - for the first time - the significant performance gap between the Japanese and western automotive industries.  It described the key elements accounting for this superior performance as lean production - ‘lean’ because Japanese business methods used less of everything - human effort, capital investment, facilities, inventories and time - in manufacturing, product development, parts supply and customer relations.

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