Fix Your Business With The Tools Of Lean Manufacturing - A Quick Run Down On The Principles Of Lean Manufacturing So You Can Understand How To Correctly Apply the Lean Manufacturing Tools To Solve Problems And Improve Your Business

Lean tools and techniques are helping companies across the globe to address competitiveness within their businesses, building the capability of their people to identify issues and improve their operations. Lean is shorthand for focusing on effectiveness and efficiency across all areas of a business. This NuBook provides the basics of Lean to help you on your journey to achieve world-class levels of competitiveness. It uses the basics of benchmarking to help you understand your true competitive position as you take the first steps on the Lean journey.

"Practicing the improvement kata is perhaps the best way we've found so far for actualizing PDCA in an organization."
—John Shook, Chairman and CEO, Lean Enterprise Institute

This game-changing book puts you behind the curtain at Toyota, providing new insight into the legendary automaker's management practices and offering practical guidance for leading and developing people in a way that makes the best use of their brainpower.

Drawing on six years of research into Toyota's employee-management routines, Toyota Kata examines and elucidates, for the first time, the company's organizational routines--called kata--that power its success with continuous improvement and adaptation. The book also reaches beyond Toyota to explain issues of human behavior in organizations and provide specific answers to questions such as:

• How can we make improvement and adaptation part of everyday work throughout the organization?
• How can we develop and utilize the capability of everyone in the organization to repeatedly work toward and achieve new levels of performance?
• How can we give an organization the power to handle dynamic, unpredictable situations and keep satisfying customers?

Mike Rother explains how to improve our prevailing management approach through the use of two kata: Improvement Kata--a repeating routine of establishing challenging target conditions, working step-by-step through obstacles, and always learning from the problems we encounter; and Coaching Kata: a pattern of teaching the improvement kata to employees at every level to ensure it motivates their ways of thinking and acting.

With clear detail, an abundance of practical examples, and a cohesive explanation from start to finish, Toyota Kata gives executives and managers at any level actionable routines of thought and behavior that produce superior results and sustained competitive advantage.