ABSTRACT
Early adopters who applied lean principles, tools, and practices primarily to production/operations physical processes were successful in large part because the barriers to lean improvements in these process areas are contained within only one or possibly two “stovepipe” bureaucracies. The cross-functional processes that have undergone lean improvements in some companies implementing lean production systems include:
Quality management
Maintenance
New product introduction
Design and engineering
Employing lean principles, tools, and practices in these processes has provided an opportunity to apply lean principles within processes as well as link several processes in a lean flow. Often, however, even companies that experience success in transforming these first four cross-functional processes to lean may not be providing effective support of information systems, or the information systems supporting the lean processes are not based on integrated systems and control data. We will discuss these processes further in this section, defining the requirements for these processes from a lean perspective. We will eventually assign the task of improving these processes to specific cross-functional teams.
