In Manufacturing
• Cycle times down by at least 20%
• 10-day standard customer order lead time
• Productivity gains of 62%
• 98% or better on-time delivery

In Administration
• Order Entry from 2 days to 7 minutes
• Engineering changes from 7 months to 1 month
• Accounts Payable from 2 days to 4 hours
• New Product Quote 35 days to 10 days

In Healthcare
• Same day office visits
• No-wait emergency room
• Productivity gains of 62%
• 20% increase in number of surgical procedures by reducing operating room changeover time from 42 to 15 minutes.

Our Approach: Learn by Doing
We are focused on supporting you in such a way as to make you self-sufficient in terms of knowledge of basic lean concepts and continuous improvement practices and ability to lead focused Kaizen events with internal resources.  To accomplish this, we will NOT be purely a ‘training” service. Our proven approach is to have clients “learn by doing,” supported by our “coach-for-learning-as-well-as-doing” technique which will develop both dedicated and project-based customer personnel at the selected customer sites.  As indicated above we also emphasize the development of a “system” of management and leadership practices that is needed to support and sustain the types of process improvements you seek within your organization.  This approach requires greater involvement of our resources for the first months, and then reduces as your team gains knowledge through application of the tools, techniques, and required management system. 

Lean Transformation Group is committed to implementing Lean systems in each function, and among senior management ranks.  Each function, major management committees, and business teams must be involved in the transformation to Lean: Lean "manufacturing" means Lean "enterprise."  We help clients redesign their business processes, including management structure and behavior, from a systems perspective, challenging the way managers perform with the goal of finding fundamentally new ways of doing work.

Management Support
Top leadership support for the redesign work will be critical to the success of this effort. In our experience this takes the form of strategy deployment with strong communication follow up (catchball) to assure alignment with the strategic objectives and consistent top management participation in a schedule of reporting, reviewing and problem solving events to drive accountability for implementation.  As a result, our approach includes our involvement at 30, 60 and 90-day milestones in the implementation schedule to advise on implementation issues and use of lean tools and practices and to partner with managers and executives on techniques and practices for leading continuous improvement initiatives.  A wrap up and reflection session with executives, managers and project leaders is a standard part of our approach to complete the learning process of one project before beginning another.

Our Team
Our approach is plan-based, yet action-oriented.  We strive first and foremost to ensure the transfer of both knowledge and implementation skill from us to our clients.   In contrast with other methodologies, we do not demand that clients commit to placing our consultants in their facilities on a full-time basis; we have found that may actually inhibit the transfer of know-how.   Nor do we emphasize the easy, quick-hit but short-term successes of the typical five-day Kaizen workshop by itself.  We desire quick change, but we also want to support change that is long-lasting and therefore urge on taking a step-by-step, multi-level approach to ensure that the knowledge is transferred and the necessary systems and practices are in place.

This support will be a team effort of the Lean Transformation Group, whose experienced lean practitioners focus on creating client self-sufficiency within clients.  We believe that self-sufficiency is the only way to sustain the type of transformation most companies seek and need.  From our perspective self-sufficiency means an organization has the ability to deploy lean as a strategy, use value stream mapping to redesign its processes, conduct successful Kaizen activities to implement the redesigned processes and follow up systematically to learn how to sustain and continuously improve those processes. Our “technology transfer practice” is supported by a team of individuals who have significant credentials such as:

•  Nine are on the faculty of the Lean Enterprise Institute. 

•  Eight have worked with a Fortune 10 company resulting in a self-sufficient organization taking billions of dollars out of the business processes using lean principles.

•  Three are authors on books concerning lean applications in a variety of industries: two of  these authors have been awarded the highly sought Shingo Research Prize for their work in leading edge applications. 

We will be staffing your job from this pool of resources for your specific needs.