Struggle to Get Lean at ArvinMeritor

January 7th, 2004 by Hal

Fortune Magazine has a great story of ArvinMeritor's efforts at staying competitive by adopting a lean approach to manufacturing. Unfortunately, Fortune doesn't make their stories available online except to subscribers. (Fortune does allow subscribers to send articles to their friends. Go figure! Maybe I can figure send you a copy without violating my subscriber agreement. Check back here.) Here's the story The Struggle to Get Lean for subscribers.

There are three issues that matter to those of us doing projects.

Companies are being squeezed by a shrinking group of buyers. Customers are getting bigger and demanding reductions in prices from one year to the next.
Managers must shift their roles from providing decisions and answers to removing roadblocks for people doing the work.
Continuous improvement is the new way of life. Every team, every product line, every factory must learn to produce more value each day.

The methods and implementation approaches are different in a factory from a project. The issues are generally the same. We must take the waste out of our projects. The principles for doing so are well-documented. If you haven't read Lean Thinking you owe it to yourself to do so now. And if you haven't done so already, then sign-up for the teleconference series. Don't miss the opportunity to spend time with Norman Bodek in February and Jim Womack in May to talk about lean.

Lean Case Study Available

Jim Womack in Great Form

What Do We Mean by Lean?

Context is Everything for Managing Projects Successfully

Scrum: Inspect and Adapt

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2004 at 11:46 pm and is tagged: PM practice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Convert this post to a PDF document.

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2 Responses to “Struggle to Get Lean at ArvinMeritor”

Mark G Lomas Says:
January 8th, 2004 at 9:42 am
… er … interesting. Some relevant, some LOTR, some soft porn stories, photos of someones dog, …

Hal, did you try this out ?
Hal Says:
January 8th, 2004 at 2:30 pm
I have been trying out Waypath. Perhaps the service is more promise than result. The idea of context search based on the text of the whole posting sounds like a good idea. Also, being able to limit the results to just weblogs is also attractive. I’ll leave it up for awhile.

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