ABSTRACT
Engineering activities are highly creative and usually follow a project-based development approach, so there is at least one manager who must be involved from the very start in the lean journey: the project manager, or their equivalent in our organisation – along with their team, of course. Dissemination of ideas and knowledge to other levels of management may then occur, or they may not. When applied in a partial or restrictive way, e.g., with the focus simply on removing waste, cutting costs, and eliminating ‘dead time’, the very essence of Lean – which is continuous people development – can be totally absent, giving such ‘Lean’ organisations a bad name that then tarnishing the image of Lean thinking in its entirety.
