Handbook of Lean Solutions (EN)

Pioneering work by Jones and Womack on Lean consumption and customer value.

This is perhaps the most underestimated book in Lean literature!
In their bestseller Lean Thinking, Jim Womack and Dan Jones, our LGN colleagues who introduced Lean outside Toyota, introduced five core principles of Lean. However, the first principle, customer value, is a difficult one. So what exactly is 'customer value'? How do you determine customer value?

In this book, Womack and Jones address this in detail. They begin by broadening the view from production (the focus of many improvement initiatives) to consumption, that is, from the customer's point of view. They then formulate a number of principles from the customer's point of view. Each of those principles is addressed in its own chapter, and illustrated with real-life examples of how it has been shaped by particular companies. Time and again, they show that better customer value goes hand in hand with more efficient production - so there is no trade-off or trade-off needed, provided you put on the right Lean glasses. Thus, they arrive at simple but revolutionary ideas about delivering products and services. Some of the insights they introduce are:

• how more and more companies are using consumers unnecessarily as a free labour force
• how complex consumption has become - as consumers, we have more and more suppliers of ever smaller solutions (consider: how many online accounts do you have?) and each of these services has to be searched, purchased, installed, maintained, repaired, updated and recycled.
• how most service desks in their current form are more inefficient, also for the service provider.
• how all forms of queuing, the 'hub-and-spoke' design in aviation and the XL suburban supermarkets are typical examples of mass production thinking.

En passant, the authors introduce several new or existing ways of looking at things, for example, the box score, the milk run and the consumption map.

Additional Information