ABSTRACT
Lean Cultural Principles To accomplish a Lean transformation requires that management truly understand the principles, tools, and practices that deliver the power of lean, commit to those principles, and invest in the education that the process owners, operators, and process-area managers need to learn the tools and practices that deliver the Virtual Lean Enterprise. Often we have trouble identifying principles. We think tools and practices are the same thing as principles, but they are not. A principle is something you believe in. For example, lean operational principles are those presented by Womack and Jones in their book, Lean Thinking: value, value stream, flow, pull, and the pursuit of perfection. A tool is something you apply that helps you to identify, understand, diagnose, and fix. For example, lean diagnostic, problemsolving, and continuous improvement tools include the 5 Ss, MIFA, 3 MUs, 5 Ws/1 H, 4 Ms, and the SDCA-PDCA cycles. A practice, on the other hand, is something you do once or over and over again, in a process. For example, lean practices include single-minute exchange of die (SMED), cellular layout and flow, and kanbans. When we adopt lean principles in our enterprises and apply lean tools and lean practices to our processes, we develop our own Best Processes. That is the Toyota secret. Toyota developed a set of best lean Toyota processes and is continually improving them.
