Staying Lean Second Edition Published

February 2011

The first edition of this highly acclaimed publication received a Shingo Research and Professional Publication Prize in 2009. Explaining how to create and sustain a Lean business, it followed Cogent Power’s first two Lean Roadmaps along their journey.

Since then, much has changed. Several members of Cogent Power’s senior management have moved on, steel prices have declined, and the credit crisis has sparked an unstable global economy. Set against these developments, Staying Lean: Thriving, Not Just Surviving, Second Edition reports on Cogent Power’s response to these issues—detailing how they worked through their third Lean Roadmap. It also:

• Guides readers with readily reproducible advice and an easy-to-follow model for sustaining Lean improvements
• Presents a case study of a successful multinational Lean implementation
• Covers a six-year Lean transformation from start to finish, illustrating the application of three distinct roadmaps

Focusing on how to sustain change, the new edition of this bestselling reference, illustrates the experience of a multi-national company that successfully implemented Lean in its manufacturing and commercial operations. Based on a model of sustainable change, the text defines by example the elements of successful Lean management that are often difficult to emulate as well as the more visible features of process management.

Purchase a copy from Amazon

First Edition - Staying Lean - Thriving, Not Just Surviving'

Download a low resolution print version (12mb): Staying Lean: Thriving, Not Just Surviving

Or buy from Amazon

In the current climate, the pressure is on organisations to improve their performance to be able to compete in a global marketplace and this requires being able to outperform low-cost economies. The way some organisations and supply chains are responding to this is to implement lean thinking across and within the extended enterprise (Womack and Jones, 1994). The aim for a manufacturing organisation is that by working with suppliers and customers they be able to keep the manufacturing close to the market and, as a result, become more flexible and responsive so that they can become the supplier of choice to strategic customers.

However, it has been suggested that at least 50% of business improvement programmes are deemed by the firms involved to be failures over the longer term and up to 70% fail to achieve all of their intended benefits (Hammer and Champy, 1993). This raises the question: How can improvements in operational and commercial aspects of a manufacturing environment be combined and managed in a way that provides the business with long-term business success and the internal process and people capability to continuously propel that organisation to further improvement?

The book “Staying Lean: Thriving, not just surviving” tells the story of a multi-national organisation’s journey to Lean and how they successfully implemented and sustained Lean to help turn the organisation’s financial performance around.

The story is based around the Lean Iceberg Model of sustainable change and addresses the often invisible, and hard to copy, enabling elements of successful Lean organisations: Strategy and Alignment, Leadership, Behaviour and Engagement as well as the more visible features: Process Management and the application of Lean Technology, Tools and Techniques.

The book was developed as part of the SUCCESS (Sustainably Channelled Change at Every Scale and Situation) project that was funded by the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) grant to Cardiff University Innovative Manufacturing Research centre. It is designed to be used as a practical workbook to guide practitioners along their own Lean journey so that Lean becomes embedded in the organisation and sustains the performance improvements over the long-term.