The Elusive Lean Enterprise

In today's fast-paced and volatile business environment, customers are demanding increased flexibility and lower cost, and companies must operate in a waste-free environment to maintain a competitive edge and grow margins. Lean Enterprise is the process that companies are adopting to provide superior customer service and to improve bottom line performance. Are you contemplating Lean for your manufacturing or office facility? Are you already implementing Lean but are dissatisfied with the speed of change? Do your employees think that Lean is just the new flavor of the month? Are you being forced to go Lean by your customers or your competitors? Are you anticipating going offshore to cut costs? Regardless of your situation, this book is designed to help guide you through the Lean transformation and avoid the pitfalls. Find out why many companies are failing to live up to the promise of Lean, and why there may be alternatives to outsourcing or going offshore. Learn from the mistakes of others and avoid the trials that often kill the initiative. Find out why you must change, how to change, and how to institutionalize the process. Understand the costs of outsourcing or going offshore and compare these to the Lean alternative. For those companies that fail to commit to the process and truly change the culture, a Lean Enterprise will remain elusive. This is the revised, second edition of this highly-acclaimed book with a new foreword by Dolf Kahle, CEO of Visual Marketing Systems. 3