Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation

Ir si a Great book with amazing information. The lean culture should be adopted by every company.
I also wanted to clarify that someone that gave this book a one star rating mentioned they Toyota is not using Lean and they is very incorrect and it is misinforming people. http://www.toyota-global.com/company/vision_philosophy/toyota_production_system/ on this website you can see that it is still used and its part of Toyota's culture.

The only way to be competitive in the world marketplace is to be much more efficient. In other words "lean and mean." Efficient at engineering, efficient at manufacturing and efficient at meeting/exceeding customer expectations are all keys to becoming more competitive.

This book and their Machine that Changed the World are good resources for manufacturing facilities more lean. And...lean thinking leads to more lean thinking.

Using the Toyota system as a guide, Womack and Jones address how companies can eliminate waste and increase profits. They write:

"Our earnest advice to lean firms today is simple: To hell with your competitors; compete against perfection by identifying all activities that are muda and eliminating them. This is absolute rather than a relative standard which can provide the essential North Star for any organization."

Well written with many telling examples. Recommended!

The Re-Discovery of Common Sense: A Guide to: The Lost Art of Critical Thinking

This book is a very good introduction to "lean manufacturing". I would say it is aimed at managers or other interested people in implementing lean manufacturing in their organizations. This book convinced me immediately of the benefits of lean practices, so if you are finding resistance in your organization to implement it, you could give out some copies of this book.

This book is more a general reading book (basics & benefits, resistance you might encounter, etc.) than a deep study or detailed guide. If you need deeper knowledge of the different tools, more specific applications or more detail on how to apply them, you will require other literature.

Another introduction to the subject is a novel called The Gold Mine: A Novel of Lean Turnaround, both books address the topic highlighting different key aspects of lean, so reading both gives you probably a broader perspective. The gold mine goes a little deeper into the subjects and its emphasis on key concepts is very appealing.

This is the revised and updated version of the 1996 edition, however the only change is the edition of a Part IV Epilogue written in 2003.

For one of the first books to explore the concepts of Lean and the Toyota Production System (TPS) it does a fairly good job. I found Parts I - Lean Principals, III - Lean Enterprise, & IV - Epilogue most useful. Part II - From Thinking to Action: The Lean Leap, took up half of the book 170 pages of 340, to explain the lean journey of multiple companies of different sizes and cultures. While I found some of the examples to be useful, all of them were somewhat vague and very drawn out. Had I not needed to read this book for an exam, I likely would have set it down during this part and not picked it up again.

My favorite chapter in the book is Chapter 13: Dreaming about Perfection in Part III. The author takes 5 common activities and "dreams" about how they would operate if they were truly lean. Not just by implementing various tools and techniques but by truly revolutionizing them from the perspective of the customer. It really drove home what breakthrough concepts or paradigm shifts look like.

Overall I would recommend The Toyota Way over this book as a broad overview of what the concept of Lean is.

Case study after case study. He never really explains HOW to eliminate waste. Simply that you "should". I feel like he's setting me up for the end of the book where he'll say "hey, hire me as a consultant"

Would you like to double productivity, cut development time by 60%, reduce inventory by 65%, reduce throughput time by 95%, reduce capital investment while doubling sales? Pre-existing assets, technologies, practices, organizations and concepts often cause enormous waste, i.e. activity which does not create value. This exciting book is about a way to do more and more with less and less - to create value instead of waste.
Lean Principles
1. Accurately understand VALUE (needs and preferences) from the customer's perspective.
2. Perform VALUE STREAM analysis. This will reveal three types of actions: 1) those that create value, 2) those that do not create value but are unavoidable in the present situation and 3) those that don't create value and are immediately avoidable.
3. After eliminating avoidable waste activities, make the remaining activities continuously FLOW. This requires the elimination of departmentalized "high speed" batch-and-queue "efficiency". It requires quick changeovers, "right-sizing" and close coupling of operations without buffers. The authors state that the results are always a dramatic reduction of effort and improvement in throughput.
4. Because of the radical reduction achieved in throughput time, you now are capable of Just In Time operations. You can now let the customer PULL the product.
5. Finally search for PERFECTION. Perfection is, of course, impossible. But the effort compels progress.
"Just Do It"
The lean approach is to "just do it" with dedicated cross functional product teams which often include suppliers and customers.
The beauty of this system is that it won't work at all unless everything works properly all the time. Thus 100% performance becomes an absolute requirement.
The authors present a number of very interesting case studies in which dramatic results were obtained. They conclude with advice as to how to get started - including a list of available resources. This book is especially well-suited to operations managers, but will also benefit any executive in a company that relies upon operational excellence as a part of their strategy.
(Robert Bradford is CEO of Center for Simplified Strategic Planning and co-author of Simplified Strategic Planning)

This book provides many case studies of companies outside of the auto industry that converted to lean production. It details the personnel changes they had to make, changes in factory layout, differences in the supply chain and much more. Where "The Machine that Changed the World" was a primer to lean production, "Lean Thinking" is more of a how-to book. Together, they make a great pair and provide a fairly in-depth view of the subject. As in, "The Machine that Changed the World", there is plenty of hard data to back up the claims that these companies improved after switching to lean thinking.

I am a college student majoring in mechanical engineering and read this book and "The Machine that Changed the World" to get a broad understanding of lean production. The two books did just that and even gave me many ideas on how to convert a student organization I am involved with (SAE) to more of a lean organization. As much as possible anyway.

Prepare to have your neurons rewired. An excellent dive into Lean and how it has been effective in the manufacturing environment. This book laid the mental model for me to see how breakthroughs happen on the shop floor. The challenge for me is that I work in a engineer/procure/construct/maintain firm. My firm is discontinuous with process villages linked together. While the book is excellent, be prepared to abstract the concepts from the book and use your creativity to try and see through the Lean lens into the discontinuous world of service. If you are interested in learning more about the discontinuous world check out Lean Enterprise Systems-Using IT for Continuous Improvement by Steve Bell. That book is worth its weight in gold!!!

Lean Thinking- A very well written account of a long study of the theory of customer driven value thinking. The elimination of waste in accomplishing customer driven trade is the main goal of this theory. The book has been tuned over a series of revisions, so it is well polished. While I am no expert on the topic, I can at least attest to the fact that the volume is well written and referenced. Their views are spread over a period of many years, giving them the benefit of tracking case study performance over the long term. Companies both large and small have been studied and tracked to determine the benefits of these theories.

The book was truly eye-opening for me! Having spent more than enough time with management consultants and the "programs of the week," misguided Six Sigma projects, etc., I am very cautious about "new" programs. The simple, clear, transformational philosophy of the book was amazing to me. While the book does not outline the steps to take for making a Lean transformation, it should be required reading, before any venture into Lean management. Without an understanding of the philosophy behind Lean, many people mistakenly try to use it as a "tool" to cut costs, which will fail miserably. Lean - the new paradigm.

There are other books on Lean Manufacturing that I got more out of (such as The Toyota Way) but this book is a must-read, and arguably the first book purely on lean someone should pick up. Lean is not a manufacturing system so much as a manufacturing (and in a larger sense a business) philosophy, and this is one of the few books that fully brings that to light.

Lean Thinking is a very useful book as a reference material for a Bachelor/Master degree student or person already working, looking for information on LEAN.
Author's explains the concepts with good examples and approachable way making the partly difficult topic more reader friendly.

Book does not always provide clear answers yet challenges the reader to think and consider own approaches when basics is been understood.

As a business book, very enjoyable reading.

I personally do a vast amount of reading with lean enterprise being of special interest. Womack has done some great work, but this is a "tough read" even for serious lean enthusiasts. I typically finish a book of this length within 2-3 days then re-read it and highlight. It literally took me 11 weeks because I was lulled to a point in which reading further would be of no benefit and would have to put it back on the shelf and revisit it days later. I realize that scholarly and business writing is not especially exciting as I am constantly reading and doing research but this one was tough even for me, an avid reader.

This book is a practical guide through lean thinking & principles. Highly readable, immediately applicable. A must for any professional rolling out Lean. I have been going through the chapters and returning time and again for bits and peaces that I can use in my own work. Excellent,usable and exciting to read.

This book provides a very unique perspective on how to run a business. These methodologies can be applied to any industry, as the authors suggest.

Read The Toyota Way as well to get a real example of how this works.

This book offered very little new information other than the basics that any of us who have ever done process improvement already know. Although the authors mention how Lean works in non-manufacturing environments, their examples are almost purely manufacturing.

Not a bad read for a college student, but a waste of time for practitioners. Totally an introduction.

The points I wanted to addressed have been already written in a very well matter. I do not want to waste any more time on this.
I take lean very seriously and believe it is the only way business can survive. With that said it must be addressed with a common sense approach. There are many factors that that are weighed as much as anything else given such as engineering change introduced in 99% of the cases may not be required thus the rework of WIP is not required. This may balance the scale tremendously.
In regards to picking up parts multiple times versus having a person do several tasks at one time equals human mistakes.
Do not waste your time with this book. I am removing this muda from my life. I still embrace lean and 6-Sigma. It is a balance, you cannot focus 100% one with and ignore the other.

I think this book is largely bogus. Sure there is logic in having an efficient system to your manufacturing process and in buying the machines you actually need instead of something too big or too inflexible. But while the Japanese may have ninjas and 'Asian sexual secrets,' they haven't discovered any new principles of manufacturing that we insecure Americans didn't already know a long time ago. Despite the stylish Japanese mumbo-jumbo, there isn't much in this 'lean thinking' that Henry Ford didn't already have figured out by 1914, although the limitations of the technology of that day prevented him from implementing his ideas fully.

Speaking of Henry Ford, among the historical inaccuracies in this book is the oft-repeated untruth that all the millions of Ford Model T cars produced over 19 years were all exactly alike. The truth is that several body styles, ranging from open touring cars to 'Torpedo Roadsters' to closed sedans were produced, and the entire line went through at least two major styling changes and thousands of mechanical improvements.

Some parts of this book just don't make any sense at all, revealing amazingly poor writing on the part of the authors and -- given that this is the revised edition -- an astonishing lack of critical thinking on the part of eager readers. For example, on page 178 it is told how Pratt & Whitney replaced a particularly inefficient turbine blade grinding machine with 'eight simple three-axis grinding machines.' But in the very next paragraph they mention 'each of the nine machines,' and then go on to say, 'The number of parts in the process would fall from about 1,640 to 15 (one in each machine plus one waiting to start and one blade just completed).' Then to top it off, the text is accompanied by a diagram showing a grinding process with eight grinders and two EDM machines. I can see I'm not the only one who flunked math here.

Additionally, the book is full of stories of Japanese lean thinking gurus walking into American factories without advance notice and ordering that all the production machinery be uprooted and repositioned -- immediately. Supposedly, this is done and things brought up to running condition again in six or eight hours, with greatly improved efficiency. Where I come from, we have bothersome things like OSHA rules and the National Electrical Code that prevent us from just sliding around 100 ton presses and precision-levelled CNC machine tools like so many couches and chairs.

Also telling is the example the authors themselves picked to illustrate their concept of 'flow.' One of them asked his daughters, aged six and nine, what would be the best way to fold, address, seal, stamp and mail the monthly issue of their mother's newsletter. The girls naturally replied that you ought to concentrate on one task at a time, and process all the newsletters up to that point before moving on to the next step. But the authors assert that this is wrong, and that this type of work can be done more efficiently by carrying one workpiece through to completion before starting on the next workpiece. Aside from the cruelty of forcing his daughters to walk out to the mailbox and back 547 times, I can tell you from long experience that this is 100% pure BS. Flow is great, as Henry Ford used flow. But to make a blanket statement that it is better to keep one workpiece in hand and pick up ten tools, than it is to keep one tool in hand and pick up ten workpieces, is just plain wrong. It is the tool that requires technique and concentration and uniformity of use, not the workpiece. By spotlighting this ill-chosen example, the authors have revealed in their own introduction a total lack of real-world experience and a disdain for common sense that runs throughout the entire book.

I ordered six copies of this book for my workplace. I ordered used copies not knowing exactly what condition they would in. I was pleasantly surprised to find them in very good condition when I received them and would have no problem ordering again.

The author's example of mind-set of the workers. P.22, the 6 and 9 year children of one, preparing their mother's newsletters in batch steps vs. doing all steps on each newsletter before starting the next newsletter. So, beyond example: Next, the consulting locust flies in with kaikaku, stops the newsletter production line, fixes the value stream the Toyota way, takes all the cash he can from weak management bedazzeled by Lean terminology, then flies away. What is left? Disheartened 6 and 9 year old child-laborers, who instead of mild praise for their work are insulted and the mother-manager, who has to take her newsletters and stuff them herself. Or she can force the children to help with the now "chore" or other chore while Mother gets her newsletters done. This works with a lot of indoctrination with exercises of bowing to the masters in the east: It is unfortunate but necessary that some Toyota drivers must be sacrificed for the overall good of society.

So as to not muda Internet electrons, read this review on this book. It is correct with facts to back up claims. It's not another "best thing I ever read in my life (today)" review by one who drank the kool-aid:

Hot Air and Vague Puffery, December 29, 2005
By Fuzzbean (Nangoku, Japan) - See all my reviews

"This review is from: Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated (Hardcover)
I think this book is largely bogus. Sure there is logic in having an efficient system to your manufacturing process and in buying the machines you actually need instead of something too big or too inflexible. But while the Japanese may have ninjas and 'Asian sexual secrets,' they haven't discovered any new principles of manufacturing that we insecure Americans didn't already know a long time ago. Despite the stylish Japanese mumbo-jumbo, there isn't much in this 'lean thinking' that Henry Ford didn't already have figured out by 1914, although the limitations of the technology of that day prevented him from implementing his ideas fully."
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