Frontiers of Lean Summit

There have been a lack of postings here for a few days because I have been at the Frontiers of Lean Summit 2005 in Stratford-upon-Avon, eagerly hoovering up new ideas to share. The summit is organised by the Lean Enterprise Academy which is headed up by Dan Jones (co-writer of "Lean Thinking" with James Womack). I would recommend a look at their site at www.leanuk.org.

The biggest idea of the summit was to look at the consumption process. Hitherto, Lean has mostly focused on the steps that a provider goes through to produce their product or service. The thought put forward by Womack and Jones (repeated in their new book "Lean Solutions") was to map the process that the consumer goes through, particularly concentrating on the time and value. They are right when they say that it seems that companies consider that the public's time is of no value. Companies think nothing of making consumers queue multiple times to get value. The reality is that they could cut the provision and consumption processes at the same time and deliver more value at lower cost.

In the 80s and 90s it was shown that quality is free. Moreover, not only does higher quality not cost a company more, but that it will actually save them money. The ideas in "Lean Solutions" say that saving our customers time can actually save the company's time and money.

More from the summit in the next few posts.

Best,

Rob