Lean Research Themes Survey
An invitation to complete a short questionnaire on lean research themes
Aims
This survey aims to gain feedback on potential themes and topics that could form part of a research programme that explores the nature and application of lean thinking and related schools of thought. As the research will have a practical focus, it is considered important to elicit the views of practitioners working in organisations committed to applying lean thinking.
Who Should Complete It
- Lean or continuous practitioners working in all types of organisations
- Managers in operational, planning, HRM or training & education roles
- Researchers with an interest in lean thinking and related areas
Method
A short on line questionnaire that asks about the relevance of some key research themes and topics to current business issues and challenges, and also asks for views on how some current issues could impact an organisation’s lean endeavours. It should take about 5 minutes to complete. Data is collected anonymously and no personal information is obtained,
Timing
Data will be collected in December 2017 and January 2018. Results should be available from March 2018
Results Dissemination
The results will be reported on the LCS website and communicated through LCS communication channels
New Accreditations – Dec 2017
New Accreditation Congratulations
Ad Esse Consulting
Ad Esse Consulting, formed in 2004, delivers business transformation consultancy to the public and not-for-profit sector, focusing on housing, charities and local authorities.
The scale of its work ranges from small assignments focused on a single issue, to organisation-wide transformations lasting more than a year delivered by a team of consultants. Often as part of these assignments it will train an in-house support team in lean principles, as well as lean leadership training for senior managers.
Business Transformation Associates
BTA, founded in August 2012 , has an approach that focuses on “operational realities” and believes that its work must deliver practical solutions that drive business results. The directors – past business executives and seasoned lean professionals – bring expertise, development and coaching skills, as well as interim project management to support business transformation using lean tools and techniques.
The business is based Northumberland, just north of Newcastle upon Tyne and is an ISO 9001:2015 accredited company, as well as an EAL assessment center for NVQ’s in Business Improvement Techniques and has achieved Matrix Accreditation.
Lean People
Netherlands based Lean People is a new company focusing on helping organisations realise and exploit continuous improvement. It adopts an holistic approach to CI, using lean management, six sigma and scrum and offers in company and open courses.
Its goal is to make continuous improvement “fun” and puts a particular emphasis on actual change of behavior, encouraging the development of a “movement”, focussing on ‘the why’ and working with people in a structured way towards their goals.
University of Winchester
The University of Winchester is the UK’s first LCS accredited university and has set up a Continuous Improvement Unit to promote the application of CI methods.
It has developed a unique lean Ambassadors Network as a vehicle to promote continuous improvement and it will deliver Lean Six Sigma internal training for colleagues and students, as well as externally. It will also offer module (options) as part of the faculty of Business Law and Sport Masters offering, and to colleagues who sign up to be continuous improvement champions for their faculties and professional services departments.
Westpac
Westpac is Australia’s first bank and Australia’s oldest company and has been supporting all Australians for over 200 years. It has five customer facing divisions serving around 13 million customers.
It has a well established approach to continuous improvement and its Lean Centre of Excellence (CoE) comprises of experienced Lean facilitators/coaches and forms part of a business unit that is supporting Westpac to achieve the strategy by helping to accelerate its strategic priorities and developing skills and capability in Lean.
Re-accreditation Congratulations
Panalpina
For Panalpina, the global provider of forwarding and logistics services, 2017 marks the start of its third two year LCS licence stint, which has coincided with the fifth anniversary of the founding of LogEx – its vehicle to promote and develop CI practice in the organisation.
Over this period LogEx has had a positive impact on the organisation’s transformation because of its sound deployment model and robust improvement methodology. This has made it a very effective vehicle to introduce continuous improvement principles to critical parts of the company and as such principles are the foundation to improving business effectiveness, their widespread adoption means that the impact can be significant.
Reinvigoration
Reinvigoration, the UK specialist in service operation transformation has secured another two-year accreditation – its third since it first became accredited in 2011.
Reinvigoration, the only service-sector-specific accredited body to offer LCS qualifications at all 3 levels, applies a blend of consulting, training and coaching services to help their clients achieve measurable improvements to processes, performance and capabilities.
Read more about Reinvigoration’s accreditation.
Vantis Consulting
Vantis Consulting has built a reputation for delivering exceptional sustainable operational improvements across many sectors, providing a full range of consultancy services and training to clients. As a ‘knowledge sharing’ consultancy, its training is highly interactive and thought provoking, with a focus on people to “harvesting their own opinion and thinking from the seeds we sow.”
It is planning to offer public training courses in 2018, which will be communicated on its website – www.vantisconsulting.co.uk
Level 3 Success
April 2018: Graham Canning
Congratulations to Graham for successfully completing the LCS Level 3 Programme.
Graham is Managing Director of UK-based consultancy Lean FSL Associates Ltd. A graduate Production Engineer, Graham worked for 15 years in various Manufacturing roles, including time as a Group Leader at Toyota’s Burnaston factory. Since 2004, Graham has worked in Lean and CI consultancy roles, helping implement Lean thinking in sectors as diverse as Healthcare, Financial Services, Retail, Construction, Printing and Food & Beverage manufacture. He is an Associate Partner for a number of leading Lean and CI consultancies including OEE Consulting, SA Partners and Project 7.
An advocate of a ‘hands on’ approach at ‘gemba’, he is equally comfortable either working with Senior managers in developing Lean transformation strategies, or coaching team members through their own development as Lean practitioners.
He gained an MSc in Manufacturing Leadership from Lancaster University Management School in 2008.
Graham’s Level 3 submission demonstrated his mature strategic capability and incorporated high levels of critical reflection. His Lean thinking assignment showed his passion for developing Lean within the context of a ‘learning organisation’, and concluded that success in applying and sustaining Lean, requires a whole system approach to be taken and in particular, a focus on the critical role of Kata.
January 2018: John Blincow, Lloyds Banking Group
John is a senior manager with Lloyds Banking Group and has a career spanning 30 years in Retail Banking, Commercial Banking and Group Operations. John has had many roles in banking, including branch management, operations management, change management and, more recently over the last 9 years, programme management continuous improvement and operations excellence. He has an MBA with Edinburgh Business School and is a Member of the Chartered Institute of Bankers in Scotland (MCIBS).
John’s Level 3 Programme cases focused on leading a large scale programme of continuous improvement work delivered into the Commercial Banking Division of Lloyds. They centred around three broad themes of engaging Lloyds colleagues to deliver a simpler Commercial Bank, increasing competitiveness by building lean capability/skills and returning their middle office operations to its original design intent of value and quality.
His assignment studied the implications of the digital revolution on banking, specifically around the need to re-organise their organisational designs and set-ups to leverage planned productivity benefits. It was inspired from reading Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s seminal work ‘The Second Machine Age’ and research was gathered from 22 companies by way of questionnaires around innovation and Lean practices in a Digital age.
John concluded Banks need to strategically re-think their set up, assign skilled resource to customer value streams and also innovate around flow, quality and cross functional working.
Level 3 Success
Congratulations to the latest successful Level 3 Programme candidates
Lisa Norcross
Lisa is SVP and head of the Center of Operational Excellence for E.ON, based in Essen, Germany. Lisa is a Mechanical Engineer who has been working in operations and operational performance improvement for over 20 years across several different industries.
She started her career as a Graduate Engineer at Ford Motor Company, and after completing a post-graduate qualification in Manufacturing Management, moved into Management Consulting, working as an Operations Expert for McKinsey and Company. Between McKinsey and E.ON, she was head of Operational Excellence for Europe and China for an aluminium manufacturer.
Lisa’s submission brought together the learning from her broad experience and focused on the details of HOW to implement lean successfully and sustainably in a large, multi-national company with many competing priorities.
David Roussel
David has been working in Lean and Continuous Improvement for 25 years. His true passion for Lean started in the automotive industry during 10 years as Production Manager at Sylea Vire and then as Engineering Manager at Toyota Motors Manufacturing France.
He worked for 12 years as a Senior Expert at McKinsey & Company France, where he had the opportunity to apply Lean principles in many sectors, such as metal industry, services, food industry and retail. He helped create the McKinsey Operational Excellence Academy in Lyon in 2005 and led it from 2009 to 2015. He also created the French Model Factory in partnership with several French Lean universities and McKinsey in 2008. He E.ON Inhouse Consulting GmbH as Operational Excellence VP in 2015.
David’s broad and very diverse sectoral experience both as operational manager and as Lean expert consultant has provided him with unique insights into how Lean can be successfully implemented. His cases and observations highlighted the importance of a structured approach including a strong focus on people development, performance management and problem solving at large scale to transform big organisations successfully.
With regard to the next stage in Lean’s journey, David mentioned his learnings from the past from Ford and Toyota to better handle the challenges of current industrial and digital revolution. He is convinced that in a more and more fast changing environments, the ability of Lean organisation and Lean people to adapt quickly to change will be a critical key success factor in the future.
New Online Offering from Accredited Company
There has been a rapid growth in online training in recent years, fuelled by technology enhancements and greater acceptance of the web as vehicle for training and development by users, with web course often part of a blended training approach.
The latest offering comes from Netherlands based LCS accredited training consultancy, Maruna Process Improvement, which has just launched its Lean Basic course online.
The training results in the LCS Level 1a certification and covers lean philosophy, its origin and development, the underlying principles and the most important terms and tools. This is discussed in the online learning environment, both in text, video, assignments and exercises. The total time investment is on average 6 hours.
New Accreditations – Sept 2017
New Accredited Organisations
Devro (Scotland) Ltd
Devro (Scotland) Limited has two manufacturing sites in Scotland, with around 400 employees and manufactures a range of collagen based products for use within the food industry. Approximately 800 million metres of collagen casing will be manufactured across the two sites during 2017; approximately 60% of this will be supplied to the UK home market and the remainder will be exported to overseas markets.
Devro Scotland has implemented a number of Continuous Improvement strategies, including TQM, RCM, Six Sigma, TPM, Lean etc. More recently, an approach based on the Shingo Model for Operational Excellence has been adopted, which provides a powerful framework to transform the organisation’s culture and achieve long-term ideal and sustainable results and is now aiming to use using the Lean Competency System to:
- Reward and recognise all its Leaders, Managers and Associates for their continuous improvement knowledge and practical application.
- Ensure its training, facilitation and coaching methods, materials and activities are robust and meet a universal standard.
- Provide a legacy system that will help ensure its desired future state.
Attero
Attero is a leading Dutch waste management company that operates across the key infrastructure segments of the waste processing value chain, including energy-from-waste, organic waste processing and minerals and key strategic objective is to optimise the generation of sustainable energy and the recovery of raw materials from waste.
It is currently focusing on strategic business improvements, a key element of which is to educate employees in the application of CI methods and techniques, with all members of staff potentially in scope.
It has set up an internal Performance Improvement team, reporting directly to the CEO, that is delivering the curriculum, which is based on a set of guiding principles and includes the Attero House and its own Attero Performance System method.
Medisch Spectrum Twente
Medisch Spectrum Twente is a hospital providing general and specialised patient treatment in the area of Twente, offering a wide variety of specialist care, education and research.
It began its CI initiatives in 2012 and over 1,500 people have been trained since then in its Yellow Belt, Green Belt and Green Belt Lean Leadership courses, assisted by the Lean Consultancy Group.
