Making Materials Flow describes in plain language another step in implementing a complete lean business system. 
LEI's first workbook, Learning to See, focused on where to start — at the value stream for each product family within your facilities. 
Seeing the Whole then expanded the value stream map beyond facility walls, all the way from raw materials to customer. 
After mapping has identified waste and potential applications of flow and pull, you can use the techniques in Creating Continuous Flow to implement truly continuous flow in cellularized operations. 
Making Materials Flow takes the next step by explaining how to supply purchased parts to the value stream in order to support continuous flow. 
"Companies are making progress in creating areas of continuous flow as more managers learn about value-stream mapping and continuous-flow cells," said co-author Rick Harris, who also co-authored the Creating Continuous Flow workbook. "But as I walk through facilities and examine earnest efforts to create continuous flow, I see how hard it is to sustain steady output. The problem often is the lack of a lean material-handling system for purchased parts to support continuous-flow cells, small-batch processing, and traditional assembly lines." 
Making Materials Flow explains in plain language how to create such a system by applying the relevant concepts and methods in a step-by-step progression. The workbook reveals the exercises, formulas, standards, and forms that a consultant would use to implement the system in your environment. And, like LEI's other workbooks, Making Materials Flow answers the key question managers often have about lean tools and concepts, "What do I do on Monday morning to implement this?" The four key steps detailed in the workbook include: 
1. Developing the Plan For Every Part (PFEP). This basic database fosters accurate and controlled inventory reduction and is the foundation for the continuous improvement of a facility's material-handling system. 
2. Building the purchased-parts market. Learn the formulas and methods to size and operate a market that eliminates the waste of hoarding, searching for parts, and storing inventory throughout a facility. 
3. Designing delivery routes. You get the principles and calculations that turn a sprawling, messy plant into an organized community where operators get the parts they need, when needed, and in the quantity needed, delivered right to their fingertips. Proper delivery routes not only improve inventory and flow but also safety and housekeeping. 
4. Implementing pull signals to integrate the new material-handling system with the information management system. Learn the steps to creating a system that keeps inventory under control by allowing operators to pull just what they need while focusing on producing value for customers. You'll also learn how to calculate the number of pull signals needed and how often to deliver material. 
Finally, you'll learn how to sustain and continuously improving the system by implementing periodic audits of the material-handling system across the chain of management, from route operator to plant manager. You'll learn the five-step process for introducing audits of the market, routes, and pull signals by a cross-functional team from production control, operations, and industrial engineering. 
Harris and co-authors Chris Harris and Earl Wilson lead you through 10 simple but pragmatic questions that show how a manufacturing facility implements a robust but flexible lean material-handling system for purchased parts: 
The Plan For Every Part (PFEP) 
1. What information should you include in the PFEP? 
2. How will you maintain the integrity of the PFEP? 
Developing a Purchased-Parts Market 
3. Where do you locate your purchased-parts market? 
4. What is the correct size for your purchased-parts market, and what is the correct amount of each part to hold in the market? 
5. How do you operate your purchased-parts market? 
Designing the Delivery Route and the Information Management System 
6. How do you convey parts from the purchased-parts market to the production areas? 
7. How do your production areas signal the purchased-parts market what to deliver and when? 
8. How do you fill the delivery route? 
Sustaining and Improving 
9. How can you sustain the performance of your lean material-handling system? 
10. How can you identify and remove additional waste? 
An appendix explores how to adapt the key principles of lean material-handling to more complex environments, such as incorporating work-in-process (WIP) markets into the system for purchased parts, adding delivery routes from production cells to a finished-goods market, and applying the system to low-volume, high-mix processes. 
Making Materials Flow will benefit lean leaders, managers, and executives in production control, operations, and engineering who have at least a basic knowledge of lean concepts such as value-stream mapping, cell design, and standard work. The 93-page workbook contains more than 50 illustrations.

Making Materials Flow: A Lean Material-Handling Guide for Operations, Production-Control, and Engineering Professionals

Education & Teaching

Harris, Chris

Harris, Rick

Wilson,Earl

Schools & Teaching

Lean Enterprises Inst Inc

Creating Level Pull shows you how to advance a lean manufacturing transformation from a focus on isolated improvements to improving the entire plant-wide production system by implementing a lean production control system. Lean efforts at most companies focus on point kaizen (e.g., reducing set up times, implementing 5S, etc.) that improves a small portion of the value stream running from raw materials to finished products. Or they focus on flow kaizen that improves the entire value stream for one product family. Creating Level Pull shows how companies can make the leap to system kaizen by introducing a lean production control system that ties together the flows of information and materials supporting every product family in a facility. With this system in place, each production activity requests precisely the materials it needs from the previous activity, and demand from the customer is leveled to smooth production activities throughout the plant. Creating Level Pull is written in plain English and walks you through the implementation process using a clear question-and-answer format, supported by diagrams, value-stream maps, and key formulas. Using a realistic example facility, the author shows you how to make the transition to a robust pull system. This involves answering a series of 12 critical questions including what items to hold in finished goods inventory and what items to make to order, how to buffer the system against instability, how to schedule batch processes, and how to level the production schedule. Careful attention to leveling (called heijunka) permits facilities to accommodate variations in demand with minimum inventories, capital costs, manpower, and production lead time.

Creating Level Pull: A Lean Production-System Improvement Guide for Production-Control, Operations, and Engineering Professionals (Lean Tool Kit)

Smalley, Art

The Gold Mine: a Novel of Lean Turnaround deftly weaves together the technical and human pieces of implementing lean manufacturing in an engaging story that readers will find both compelling and instructive. Authors Freddy and Michael Ballé have produced the first integrated and systematic approach to a set of ideas that have maximized value and minimized waste throughout the world. At the heart of the Gold Mine is Bob Woods, a curmudgeonly sensei coaxed out of retirement by his son Mike to help boyhood friend Phil Jenkinson save his struggling company. Despite terrific products and a backlog of orders, Phil’s company cannot generate enough cash from its operations to pay its bills. And so Mike enlists Bob to help his pal fix this crisis. 
"You’re trying to deal with your mess as if it was a technical problem," Bob tells Phil. "Move this machine here, change this design there, which it is to some extent, but … it’s all about people. You have a leadership problem not just a production or business problem." As Phil begins to tackle the key challenges necessary to improve his company’s operations, he comes to understand the deeper points of lean. Readers will also draw powerful insights from his journey. 
The Gold Mine presents all the key lean principles, ranging from well-known ideas such as pull and flow, to lesser-known yet equally important principles such as jidoka and heijunka. The book also reveals lean as a system—using a realistic story to show how the principles are interrelated and how they lead to useful tools such as kanban or 5S.

The Gold Mine: A Novel of Lean Turnaround

Literature & Fiction

Balle, Freddy

Ballé, Michael

Contemporary

This guide is designed to be used with the Mapping to See Kit. We've developed the contents of this guide to enhance active learning. The structure of the modules in the guide matches the learning structure used in the Mapping to See Kit, designed specifically for office and service environments. Room is provided in the workbook so that people can take detailed notes and draw current-state and future-state value-stream maps. The guides also include all of the handouts used throughout the workshop. Modules begin with a page showing the workshop flow; students always know where they are in the course content, what's been covered, and what comes next. Each module ends with a short quiz to check and reinforce understanding.

Mapping to See: Participant Guide: Value-Stream Improvement for the Office and Services

Business & Money

Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc.

Management & Leadership

As understanding of lean and its application to the entire enterprise has deepened, organizations find that they need resources to help them perform core business tasks in new, more effective ways. One of the most critical of these tasks is new product development. The Lean Enterprise Institute is honored to publish Lean Product and Process Development, by Allen Ward, one of the pioneers in the study and practice of lean product development. In this breakthrough text, Ward asks basic questions that drive at the fundamentals of product development, and observes the sources (a.k.a. wastes) of the most common maladies that plague many product development organizations. He distills what might be termed cornerstones from the practices of lean product developers, which differ remarkably from conventional practice. Ward uniquely melds observations of effective teamwork from his military background, engineering fundamentals from his education and personal experience, design methodology from his research, and theories about management, cognition, and learning from his understanding of history and interactions with clients. With Lean Product and Process Development, Ward carries the implications of his theories into specific, practical recommendations, and employs systems thinking in all aspects of thought and investigation.

Lean Product and Process Development

Ward, Allen C.

"The life of lean is experiments. All authority for any sensei flows from experiments on the gemba [the place where work takes place], not from dogmatic interpretations of sacred texts or the few degrees of separation from the founders of the movement. In short, lean is not a religion but a daily practice of conducting experiments and accumulating knowledge." So writes Jim Womack, who over the past 30 years has developed a method of going to visit the gemba at countless companies and keenly observing how people work together to create value. Over the past decade, he has shared his thoughts and discoveries from these visits with the Lean Community through a monthly letter. With Gemba Walks, Womack has selected and re-organized his key letters, as well as written new material providing additional context. Gemba Walks shares his insights on topics ranging from the application of specific tools, to the role of management in sustaining lean, as well as the long-term prospects for this fundamental new way of creating value. Reading this book will reveal to readers a range of lean principles, as well as the basis for the critical lean practice of: go see, ask why, and show respect.

Gemba Walks

Womack, James P.

Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream will change the way you think about your supply chain and logistics networks - giving you a way to act using lean principles to transform and continuously improve. In this pioneering workbook, lean logistics veterans Robert Martichenko and Kevin von Grabe explain step-by-step a comprehensive, real-life implementation process for optimizing your entire fulfillment stream from raw materials to customers, including two critical concepts: calculating the total cost of fulfillment and collaborating with across all functions and firms along the stream. Your company, like most, probably calculates costs at different points within departments, such as the piece price paid by the purchasing department. Few companies figure the total cost associated with each major function across the fulfillment stream. Calculating total cost, which to most executives is surprisingly large, lets you measure the impact of your improvement efforts on operational performance and

Building a Lean Fullfillment Stream: Rethinking Your Supply Chain and Logistics to Create Maximum Value at Minimum Total Cost

Martichenko, Robert

Von Grabe, Kevin

Industries

Managing to Learn: Using the A3 Management Process to Solve Problems, Gain Agreement, Mentor and Lead

Shook, John

What should you do first when starting to implement lean manufacturing? What comes next, then next? With the raft of information now available about lean principles, it’s easy to get confused. Kaizen Express clarifies the process using a rapid, nonstop style to explain the essential elements of the Toyota Production System (TPS) in a logical implementation sequence. This succinct but comprehensive back-to-basics book offers lean novices and veterans alike a comprehensive primer on lean principles and implementation that returns to fundamentals and stresses the importance of learning by doing at the individual and team levels. Originally developed as an aid for teaching the essential elements of TPS to Japanese readers and non-Japanese readers working together at Japanese factories around the world, Kaizen Express keeps the bilingual format. It also preserves the illustrations or charts on every page that reinforce key points. The book also includes a glossary of TPS terms in Engl

Kaizen Express: Fundamentals for Your Lean Journey (English and Japanese Edition)

Narusawa, Toshiko

Health, Fitness & Dieting

The Lean Manager: A Novel of Lean Transformation, by lean experts Michael and Freddy Ballé, addresses the critical problem that most companies face today: how can they advance beyond realizing isolated gains from deploying lean tools, to fundamentally changing how they operate, think, and learn? The book gives companies a definitive guide for sustaining their ability to learn and to improve operations and financial performance, while continually developing people. "The only way to stay lean is to produce lean managers," says Jim Womack, author, lean management authority, and LEI founder. "Every isolated effort will recede -- or fail -- unless companies learn to use the lean process as a way of developing individual problem-solvers with the ownership, initiative, and know-how to solve problems, learn, and coach new individuals." The Lean Manager, the sequel to the Ballé's international bestselling business novel The Gold Mine, tells the compelling story of plant manager Andrew Ward as he goes through the journey to becoming a lean manager. Under the guidance of Phil Jenkinson (whose own lean journey was at the core of The Gold Mine), Ward learns to use a deep understanding of lean tools, as well as a technical know-how of his plant's operations, to foster a lean attitude that sustains continuous improvement. He learns how to use tools to unleash the creativity and motivation of people, so they learn how to solve problems as well as coach and teach others to solve problems. "I am excited and have hopes that this book will enlighten readers about what it really means to live a business transformation that puts customers first and does this through developing people," said Jeffrey Liker, author of The Toyota Way. "People who do the work have to improve the work. There are tools, but they are not tools for 'improving the process.' They are tools for making problems visible and for helping people think about how to solve those problems."

The Lean Manager: A Novel of Lean Transformation

Michael Ballé

Freddy Balle

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Books by Lean Enterprises Inst Inc