Off the shop floor, the distinctions between material and information flows often blurs. Here are nine suggestions from LEI author John Shook for adapting the mapping tool.

Off the shop floor, the distinctions between material and information flows often blurs. Here are nine suggestions from LEI author John Shook for adapting the mapping tool.

Lean Enterprise Institute Founder Jim Womack, who led the MIT research team that coined the term “lean production,” shares his slides from his "Lean Counting" keynote at the Lean Accounting Summit conference, Sept. 14-16, 2011. Womack said lean counting was the least amount of counting because from the customer's viewpoint counting doesn't add value to products or services.

For a deeper dive:
The Lean Accounting Workshop gives you the logic, key principles, and a proven methodology to create a complete lean accounting system that accurately reflects the benefits of the lean transformation. This workshop is not an academic exercise. It's based on the successful lean accounting transformation performed by The Wiremold Company and it is taught by Orest Fiume, Wiremold's vice president of finance, during the transformation.

To mark the 108th anniversary of Eisenhower's birth a blogger compared some quotes from the former president and military leader with quotes from Toyota executive Taiichi Ohno, a key developer of the Toyota Production System (the prototype lean management system), and with lean thinking concepts in general. We think the best ones are about "go see," pull, planning, and leadership. (Published by TheManufacturer.com, Oct. 21, 2008.)

Trainer Tracey Richardson explains how four deep principles reveal how lean thinking applies to any organization. 

At its core, lean is about learning. To be effective at lean, we must be able to learn collaboratively with others. Collaboration looks very different depending on the relationships and number of players involved. Here are five ways you can learn collaboratively with others to advance your lean transformation efforts.

When a Lean Thinker asked how to apply the principles of 5S to the company server, Dan Markovitz responded with advice for applying these five key concepts to electronic information files.

In 1988, Shigeo Shingo, who taught industrial engineering methods at Toyota from roughly 1955 to 1980, received an honorary Doctorate of Management from Utah State University for writings and teachings that made key contributions to the development of the Toyota Production System, the model for what would later be called lean management.

Later that year, The Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing was organized and incorporated as part of the university. In 2007, the organization was renamed The Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence because its standards have relevance to continuous improvement efforts in every industry.

On the eve of it 25^th anniversary, which will be marked by a special conference and award ceremony in Provo, Utah, May 6-10, 2013, LEI asked Executive Director Robert D. Miller to reflect on the lean management movement and The Shingo Prize’s own continuing lean journey.

As lean moves out of the "tool age," leaders—managers, directors, executives— must invest more time in the critical work of lean leadership: going to the gemba to support value creators in their improvement work and coaching and mentoring teams to develop their problem solving capabilities. This ensures that all organizational processes continuously add value to customers.