Seeing the picture through “lean thinking”

Seeing the picture through "lean thinking".

Teaching lean thinking through game: some challenges

Teaching multifaceted concepts such as Lean philosophy to students/employees that have never had any contact with it may be a quite challenging task. The challenge, when teaching students, is to create a context so that they can imagine and understand why Lean philosophy is important and how it can work. On the other hand, when teaching employees/practitioners, the challenge is to translate the...

Lean Thinking in the Warehouse

The concept of “lean” has roots in mass production, originally in the automotive industry, and most famously, at Toyota, where Ford Motor’s original Rouge manufacturing complex was used as its benchmark. Toyota’s managers studied the text of Today and Tomorrow, a book written during 1926 by Henry Ford. Ford conceived the idea of a moving assembly line, after observing the meat packing plants in...

Teaching Lean Thinking Principles through Hands-on Simulations

The teaching of Lean Enterprise Thinking in the aerospace context requires that students understand a complex subject—aerospace enterprises and their transformation—in a deep and intuitive way. Without this context, the lessons of the LAI Lean Academy Course will make little sense. A rich simulation of an enterprise with a structure and problems typical of the US aerospace industry is used as a...

Commentary: Smokeless tobacco: seeing the whole picture.

A window of opportunity? The tobacco industry, with chameleon like qualities, has continuously and successfully adapted to the changing policy environment. Witness, for example, how it has maintained a growth in profits in much of the developed world despite falling sales. With greater understanding of the hazards of second-hand smoke identified as long ago as the 1970s as ‘the most dangerous d...