The Elusive Lean Enterprise

About the Book

In today's fast-paced and volatile business environment, where customers are demanding increased flexibility and lower cost, companies must operate in a waste-free environment to maintain a competitive edge and grow margins. Lean Enterprise is the process that companies are now adopting to provide superior customer service and improve bottom line performance.

Are you contemplating Lean Enterprise for your manufacturing or office facility? Are you already implementing Lean, but dissatisfied with the speed of change? Do your employees think that Lean is just the new flavor of the month? Are you being forced to go Lean by your customers, or your competitors? Are you anticipating going offshore to cut costs?

Irrespective of your situation, this book is for you. The Elusive Lean Enterprise is designed to help guide you through the Lean transformation and avoid the pitfalls. Find out why many companies are failing to live up to the promise of Lean, and why there are alternatives to outsourcing or going offshore.

In The Elusive Lean Enterprise, lean experts Keith Gilpatrick and Brian Furlong show you what to do, what you must not do, and how to make Lean the way business is done in the 21st century.

Learn from the mistakes of others and avoid the trial and error implementation process that often kills the initiative. Find out why you must change, how to change, and how to institutionalize the process. Understand the costs of outsourcing or going offshore and compare these to the Lean alternative.

For companies that invest the time and have an effective strategy, Lean Enterprise can produce outstanding results. For those companies that fail to commit to the process and truly change the culture, a Lean Enterprise will truly remain elusive.

About the Author

Brian Furlong is the Executive Vice President of Program Development with Lean Enterprise Inc., and co-author of the acclaimed Lean Mastery WBT course. He is a seasoned, senior executive with 30 years experience in manufacturing and finance. Brian has worked for major multi-national companies such as Emerson, Westinghouse, Invensys and National Westminster Bank. Throughout his career, he has developed in-depth knowledge of a wide variety of manufacturing and administrative processes. As a former VP of Operations, he has managed multi-site domestic and international locations and has directed projects to start up plants in England, Ireland, Thailand and Mexico. Brian has also completed acquisitions in England, China and India. He is a passionate advocate of Lean Enterprise, having successfully completed transformations in numerous facilities in the United States, Mexico, Europe and Asia.

Keith is President of Lean Enterprise Inc. Keith is co-author of "Lean Mastery", an interactive E-learning education course designed to provide a Lean education to employees at all levels in the business enterprise and provide the guidelines for a successful Lean implementation. Keith began his career in Public Accounting with Haskins and Sells, then a Big 8 accounting firm. After three years in public accounting Keith moved into private industry as an internal audit professional working for GTE, United Shoe Machinery, Data Terminal Systems, Wang Laboratories Inc, and Invensys. During his career Keith has performed financial and operational audits, fraud investigations, and acquisition audits at companies located throughout the world. Keith has lived and worked in Europe and also had responsibility for audit operations within the Pacific Rim for over ten years. Keith made the transition from audit to operational management while at the Invensys Corporation where he studied Lean Enterprise concepts and became the Director of Lean Operations at the Invensys Metering Division and was responsible for the Lean transformations at over twenty manufacturing plants in North and South America, Europe, and Asia.