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Lean is more than waste elimination
In the book Lean Thinking (Womack and Jones, Free Press, 2003), Art Byrne, former CEO and CFO of The Wiremold Co. (West Hartford, CT) says: "In previous jobs, my senior bosses were more interested in massive long-range 'strategic' planning efforts, which they believed should take precedence. To my way of thinking, this is exactly backwards. Introducing lean techniques in every business activity should be the core of any company's strategy. These provide both the opportunity and the resources to generate and sustain profitable growth. Profitable growth is what the strategic planners of the world are always seeking, but find hard to achieve because their company's operations can't deliver on their strategies."
It's interesting that the more we learn about lean at Owens Corning, the broader our definition of it becomes. When we first heard about lean several years ago, in the Commercial and Industrial Insulation Business, it was simply described as a technique for eliminating waste in manufacturing processes. Since then, we've found that this definition was much too narrow for two reasons: First, lean is not just an initiative for manufacturing. Lean techniques can be applied to any business process, including administrative ones. Second, lean is much more than a technique for eliminating waste. We're beginning to understand how introducing lean techniques into every business activity drives growth, fosters innovation, increases employee engagement, directs organizational alignment, improves safety, and more.
Today, instead of thinking of lean simply as one element within our overall business strategy, we're thinking about it much more broadly. Lean has become the foundation for our business strategy. As Art Byrne points out above, this thinking has helped to simplify our strategic planning process and, more importantly, lean has given us the principles to guide our strategy, and the tools and techniques to deliver on it.
What's exciting for the manufacturing team is that as we broaden our definition of lean, we're beginning to see manufacturing in a different light. Lean thinking and tools are universal to any process. Because the manufacturing team has a head start on the rest of the organization, the other business functions are looking to manufacturing to help them with lean. Manufacturing employees are being asked to participate on...