Media Contact
Chet Marchwinski
cmarchwinski@lean.org
Phone: 203-778-0670
What Is the Lean Enterprise Institute?
The Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit training, publishing, and research center founded by James P. Womack, Ph.D, in August 1997 to give people simple but powerful tools that describe in plain language how to apply a set of ideas known as lean thinking.
These ideas, based initially on the Toyota Production System, are explained in a series of books and articles coauthored by Womack and Professor Daniel T. Jones over the past 20 years. The most widely known of these are The Machine That Changed the World (Macmillan/Rawson Associates, 1990), Lean Thinking (Simon & Schuster, 1996), Seeing the Whole: Mapping the Extended Value Stream (Lean Enterprise Institute, 2002), “Lean Consumption”, Harvard Business Review, March 2005, "From Lean Production to the Lean Enterprise", Harvard Business Review, March-April, 1994, and "Beyond Toyota: How to Root Out Waste and Pursue Perfection", Harvard Business Review, September-October, 1996.
The institute’s global mission is to be the leading educators for society in maximizing value and minimizing waste. To accomplish this goal, LEI develops and advances lean principles, tools, and techniques designed to enable positive change. LEI disseminates and shares this knowledge with the lean community through books and workbooks, public and on-site training, its web site (www.lean.org) and global affiliates.
Workbooks and Books
- Learning to See (workbook) teaches how to use value-stream mapping, a fundamental initial step in a lean transformation that creates a blueprint for applying other tools, such as kaizen events. Value-stream mapping identifies waste and potential applications of pull and continuous flow in a facility.
- Creating Continuous Flow (workbook) begins where Learning to See ends, explaining how to introduce and sustain continuous flows of material and information in cellularized operations, beginning with the critical pacemaker process that controls a value stream’s production rhythm and rate.
- Making Materials Flow (workbook) illustrates the next step by explaining how to supply necessary materials to the value stream by implementing a dependable materials-movement system using timed delivery routes.
- Creating Level Pull (workbook) explains how to create a lean production control system that ties together multiple value streams in a facility through the use of pull systems and leveling demand.
- Seeing the Whole (workbook) describes how to apply value-stream mapping beyond a facility to value streams that cross multiple facilities and companies.
- The Lean Lexicon is a graphical glossary of key lean concepts ranging from A3 Report to Yamazumi Board.
- The Machine That Changed the World (Macmillan/Rawson Associates) by Jim Womack and Dan Jones gave lean production its name and the world its first comprehensive analysis of this revolutionary new way of working.
- Lean Thinking (Simon & Schuster) by Womack and Jones is the authoritative book on how companies are applying lean principles.
- Lean Solutions (Simon and Schuster), the latest book from Womack and Jones, extends lean principles to the consumption process.
Public and On-Site Training
LEI offers practical workshops on how to implement lean and manage their deployment as an integrated system to gain the most benefit and sustain it over time:
- Value-Stream Mapping
- Business Process Value-Stream Mapping
- Train the Trainer in Value-Stream Mapping
- Resolving Conflict
- Problem Solving
- Achieving Basic Stability
- Standardized Work: The Foundation for Kaizen S
- Product Development
- Creating Continuous Flow
- Making Materials Flow
- Creating Level Pull
- Lean Logistics: Inbound for Manufacturers
- Lean Logistics: Developing an Overall Strategy
- Lean Warehousing Introduction
- Lean Warehousing Implementation
- Change Agent Skills
- Lean Accounting: The Switch from Batch to Flow
- Policy Management
Web site
The secure web site provides free resources and content, including monthly e-letters, and is divided into multiple resource areas to serve the various needs of companies making lean conversions:
- Community is where you can ask questions, post comments, read original Success Stories about lean implementations or previously published articles, download presentations, and find links to other resources.
- Training features descriptions of LEI’s practical, plain-language workshop with dates, locations, and registration information.
- The Store offers workbooks, books, training packages, CDs, value-stream mapping paper, and other tools to help launch and sustain a lean transformation.
- The Library offers tips and supplemental free content from LEI’s authors and experts.
Who We Are is the place to get background information about LEI and its products and services, check news releases, meet the people who work at the institute, and find out how to contact us.
The Global Network