Articles January 22, 2019

Exploring 25 years of Lean Literature

The purpose of this paper is to take a critical, analytical approach to explore the growth and spread of Lean through the academic and practitioner community over the last twenty-five years to understand the impact of the book The Machine that Changed the World on management thinking.

ArticlesExploring 25 years of Lean Literature

How did the publication of the book The Machine That Changed The World change management thinking? Exploring 25 years of lean literature

Download the article >>> Exploring 25 years of lean

Authors:
  • Dr Donna Samuel, Lean Academy, SA Partners, Caerphilly, UK.
  • Dr Pauline Found, Buckingham Business School, The University of Buckingham, Buckingham, UK.
  • Dr Sharon J Williams, Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK.

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Reflections on Toyota Kata

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Graham Canning, coordinator of the LERC Kata Research Network Group, draws on his experience of Kata and reflects on its take up by organisations and poses some questions on the research task ahead.
Researching Lean Themes

December 5, 2018

As part of LERC's development of its research themes, it carried out a 'voice of the customer' survey into managers' views of the relative importance of selected themes. It also asked about the barriers facing organisations implementing lean thinking. This article summarises the main results; note that its does not include an in depth analysis or commentary, which will be contained in a more detailed future report.
Learning to Evolve – A Review of Contemporary Lean Thinking (2004)

December 2, 2018

This seminal paper discussed the evolution of lean thinking and proposed a framework for understanding the evolution of lean not only as a concept, but also its implementation within an organisation and point out areas for future research.

Authors: Peter Hines, Matthias Holweg, and Nick Rich (Lean Enterprise Research Centre)