Shingo Prize Success

Staying Lean - Thriving, Not Just Surviving'

Congratulations to LERC's Dr Pauline Found and Professor Peter Hines for the selection of 'Staying Lean: Thriving Not Just Surviving' as a Shingo Research and Professional Publication Prize Recipient for 2009.

27 March 2009

Download a low resolution print version (12mb): Staying Lean: Thriving, Not Just Surviving

You can purchase a copy from LERC for £10 - email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it (or you can buy from Amazon )

In the current climate, the pressure is on organisations to improve their performance to be able to compete in a global marketplace and this requires being able to outperform low-cost economies. The way some organisations and supply chains are responding to this is to implement lean thinking across and within the extended enterprise (Womack and Jones, 1994). The aim for a manufacturing organisation is that by working with suppliers and customers they be able to keep the manufacturing close to the market and, as a result, become more flexible and responsive so that they can become the supplier of choice to strategic customers.

However, it has been suggested that at least 50% of business improvement programmes are deemed by the firms involved to be failures over the longer term and up to 70% fail to achieve all of their intended benefits (Hammer and Champy, 1993). This raises the question: How can improvements in operational and commercial aspects of a manufacturing environment be combined and managed in a way that provides the business with long-term business success and the internal process and people capability to continuously propel that organisation to further improvement?

The book “Staying Lean: Thriving, not just surviving” tells the story of a multi-national organisation’s journey to Lean and how they successfully implemented and sustained Lean to help turn the organisation’s financial performance around.

The story is based around the Lean Iceberg Model of sustainable change and addresses the often invisible, and hard to copy, enabling elements of successful Lean organisations: Strategy and Alignment, Leadership, Behaviour and Engagement as well as the more visible features: Process Management and the application of Lean Technology, Tools and Techniques.

The book was developed as part of the SUCCESS (SUstainably Channelled Change at Every Scale and Situation) project that was funded by the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) grant to Cardiff University Innovative Manufacturing Research centre. It is designed to be used as a practical workbook to guide practitioners along their own Lean journey so that Lean becomes embedded in the organisation and sustains the performance improvements over the long-term.