Lean Transformation Summit Reveals Keys to Lean for the Long Term

Online, December 21, 2009 (Newswire.com) - Many companies begin lean transformations only to succumb to cultural, management, and leadership challenges or the tough realities of a turbulent economy.

But lean transformations at a handful of businesses have endured for a decade or more, and other companies have consciously built foundations for long-term success. How these companies are pursuing "lean longevity" is the subject of the 2010 Lean Transformation Summit, sponsored by the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI), March 3-4 in Orlando, FL. Pre-conference workshops will run March 1-2.

Complete details for the Lean Transformation Summit, including how to save $500 on registration by Jan. 29 are at the LEI web site.

Conference highlights include:
- How Lantech, whose rapid and dramatic success was documented in Lean Thinking (1996), implemented a management system that supports sustainable daily improvements.
- How Goodrich Aerostructures steadily advanced a 1995 lean effort from the shop floor to a complete business system that includes product development, purchasing, supply chain management, and strategy deployment.
- How leadership behavior and employee training at FedEx Express turned airplane mechanics and other staff from skeptics into change agents, whose ideas have saved millions of dollars.
- How to introduce an enduring lean management system. LEI Founder and Chairman James P. Womack, Ph.D., who led the MIT research team that coined the term "lean," will reveal what his latest research shows about building lean for the long term. Other keynoters include Greg Peters, president, Goodrich Aerostructures; James Lancaster, president and CEO, Lantech; Phillip Coley, managing director, FedEx Express; Mike Pulick, president, Grainger U.S.
- How to apply lean thinking to Human Resources, Office and Service value streams, Behavioral Change, and how to move standardized work from "document wallpaper" to strategic company asset.

Lean Community Networking
The unique Summit design means that attendees hear executives in plenary sessions describe the critical business cases for their lean transformations. In subsequent Breakout Sessions, implementers from each company follow up on the plenary discussion by providing detailed descriptions of the methods used and results achieved.

The summit is designed to be the best networking venue in the Lean Community with many formal and informal ways for Lean Thinkers to connect with counterparts facing the same challenges.

What is Lean?
The terms lean manufacturing, lean production, or lean management refer to a complete business system for organizing and managing product development, operations, suppliers, customer relations, and the overall enterprise that requires less capital, material, space, time, or human effort to produce products and services with fewer defects to precise customer desires, compared with traditional modern management.