About Lean Associates

Lean Associates is a group of highly skilled people who all learned the Toyota Production System directly from Toyota, and have been supporting organizations in their lean transformation for over a decade.

We are dismayed with the number of challenges and the overall difficulties and struggles to implement and sustain improvements. A survey conducted by Industry Week magazine of over 1,000 companies indicated only a 2% rate of achievement of intended improvements¹. The knowledge of what Toyota does, and exactly how they do it has been widely known for over 30 years, but the overall level of success is very low.

Lean Associates is committed to supporting companies, and improving the success rate. We have spent the last 3 years collecting data and analyzing the most common outcomes of lean implementations and have developed effective countermeasures to deal with them. The most common challenges echoed by organizations around the globe are:

1. Difficulty in sustaining the results.
2. Results of efforts don't match expectations.
3. Lack of support from superiors and buy-in from subordinates and peers.
4. Lack of necessary resources (people or money)
5. Reaching a plateau and not being able to move beyond it.

Do any of these issues sound familiar? Perhaps they all do. They are, in fact, very common among companies all over the world. The good news is that Lean Associates has found a common root cause for these undesirable outcomes that can be corrected. The common root cause is the inability to effectively put the continuous improvement activities into the context of true business need and failure to install the Toyota problem solving process as a basic framework for process improvement.

We often hear that lack of leadership commitment or support is a cause of poor results. Anyone who truly understands the power of lean will support the efforts. We believe that leadership does not know the proper way to understand the issues and how to apply problem-solving thinking to meet the real needs of the business.

Our Process of teaching and coaching leadership in the organization includes the ability to properly frame the situation in the problem-solving context. Lean is simply the practice of people in organizations using problem solving as a means to improve processes and ensure long-term prosperity for the organization, the employees, and the customers they serve.

WHO WE ARE

Lean Associates is a group of highly skilled lean coaches able to guide organizations through the challenging process of creating a lean enterprise. LA is experienced working with a wide variety of organizations both domestically and internationally.

Lean Associates differs from other consulting firms in 2 significant ways:

1. All of our senior associates are former managers at Toyota. We learned Toyota's system directly from Toyota. We teach Toyota's system the way we learned it from Toyota. We received a 1st generation lean education directly from the source.
2. Our aim is to transfer knowledge and create internal capability in the shortest and most direct manner possible. We We are committed to generating measurable, sustainable P&L results and don't spend client time and resources on 'surface lean.' We have coined our unique approach "The Practical Lean System^™."

¹Annual census of manufacturers by Industry Week magazine for 2007