ABSTRACT
Many emerging lean firms reorganize by product family when the initial lean processes are formalized, implemented, and being managed on an ongoing basis. While various personnel decisions may have been made during the life of the project, at this stage implementing additional personnel reductions or removing any remaining anchor-draggers can destroy the emerging lean teamwork in the enterprise. Maintaining commitment to the lean cultural principles is essential to sustaining the lean enterprise, chief among which is the maxim that no one loses his or her job for implementing an improvement. At this stage, everyone is viewed as having implemented improvements, and normal attrition and team-based evaluations are the vehicle of choice for eliminating those who are not team players. The teams will weed these folks out in a hurry. Formal process teams, organized by product family where feasible, have by now become the norm. Excess personnel can be assigned variously, until company growth and normal attrition can absorb them. For example, additional Lean Performance teams may need to be redefined for system implementation of the enterprise resource planning (ERP), operations planning system (OPS), manufacturing execution system (MES), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), or other system enablers driving the project or recently deployed. Additional Lean Performance teams that can be defined for improved process implementation might include a team to manage the
accuracy and usefulness of bills of materials (BOMs) and routings or a team to monitor inventory accuracy.
