Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 26-30 of 51
 THE BOOK HAVE NOT RECIVED July 25, 2005
Cesar Llanas
2 out of 25 found this review helpful
AS I DID NOT RECIVED THIS ITEM YET, I CAN NOT LET YOU KNOW ANY THING.
Great, if you like stories about business. May 19, 2004
Greg Stein (California)
68 out of 80 found this review helpful
I'm not sure who the audience is for Lean Thinking. Call me naïve, but I assumed it was written by Womack and Jones to help organizations analyze their business processes and eliminate muda (Japanese for "waste"), thereby improving overall performance. However, after reading almost 250 pages of anecdotal success stories, the chapter entitled "Action Plan," where one would assume resides the punch-line of the text, I was met by the profound advice to "Get the knowledge" by hiring one of the numerous experts in North America, Europe or Japan, and read some of the "vast literature" available on lean techniques. Reminds me of the Steve Martin joke where he tells you how to be a millionaire. "First, get a million dollars."After reading Lean Thinking, I'm struck by the irony that while the authors recommend removing waste from the manner by which your products are delivered to the end customer, they don't take their own advice. The text could have been distilled from 384 pages down to five or six, since there's no real substantive instruction on how to implement lean principles. Then again, maybe I completely misinterpreted the intent of the authors as to their audience and it really was written for the business historian who enjoys reading about how Pratt & Whitney started in 1855. That must be it, because after I ponder the title, I realize that Lean Thinking is for just that, thinking. What I really wanted was a book entitled Lean Doing.
 A Roadmap for Efficient Value Creation April 23, 2004
Robert W. Bradford (Ann Arbor, MI United States)
9 out of 13 found this review helpful
Would you like to double productivity, cut development time by 60%, reduce inventory by 65%, reduce throughput time by 95%, reduce capital investment while doubling sales? Pre-existing assets, technologies, practices, organizations and concepts often cause enormous waste, i.e. activity which does not create value. This exciting book is about a way to do more and more with less and less - to create value instead of waste.Lean Principles
1. Accurately understand VALUE (needs and preferences) from the customer's perspective. 2. Perform VALUE STREAM analysis. This will reveal three types of actions: 1) those that create value, 2) those that do not create value but are unavoidable in the present situation and 3) those that don't create value and are immediately avoidable. 3. After eliminating avoidable waste activities, make the remaining activities continuously FLOW. This requires the elimination of departmentalized "high speed" batch-and-queue "efficiency". It requires quick changeovers, "right-sizing" and close coupling of operations without buffers. The authors state that the results are always a dramatic reduction of effort and improvement in throughput. 4. Because of the radical reduction achieved in throughput time, you now are capable of Just In Time operations. You can now let the customer PULL the product. 5. Finally search for PERFECTION. Perfection is, of course, impossible. But the effort compels progress. "Just Do It"
The lean approach is to "just do it" with dedicated cross functional product teams which often include suppliers and customers. The beauty of this system is that it won't work at all unless everything works properly all the time. Thus 100% performance becomes an absolute requirement. The authors present a number of very interesting case studies in which dramatic results were obtained. They conclude with advice as to how to get started - including a list of available resources. This book is especially well-suited to operations managers, but will also benefit any executive in a company that relies upon operational excellence as a part of their strategy. (Robert Bradford is CEO of Center for Simplified Strategic Planning and co-author of Simplified Strategic Planning)
Russian edition of Lean thinking January 28, 2004
Tanya Samsyka (Russia, Moscow)
1 out of 15 found this review helpful
This book was translated and published in Russia in January 2004. We find that it will be interesting and usefull for russian managers and companies.
Russian edition of Lean thinking January 28, 2004
Tanya Samsyka (Russia, Moscow)
3 out of 12 found this review helpful
Russian edition of Lean thinking was published in Russia in January 2004. It's a interesting, necessary book for Russain managers and companies...
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