ABSTRACT
There is consensus in the Lean community that the Lean tools alone are never going to sustain a Lean implementation. Still, compared with the many manual and computer-aided tools that Industrial Engineers (IEs) use, the manual pencil-and-paper Lean tools are incapable of solving complex problems. While the Lean tools have their shortcomings, the IE that is underlying them is superior to the archaic IE that is taught in textbooks. Starting around 1999, the author began complementing the mainstream textbooks he was using for IE courses that he was teaching at The Ohio State University with books on Lean. That is how he started blending the “Textbook IE” with the relevant “Toyota IE”. Every industry project that a team of students did in any course helped the author to assess whether what he was teaching was applicable in industry.
