1st Edition
The Lean Engineering Travel Guide The Best Itineraries for Developing New Products and Satisfying Customers
Lean is an essential way of working in a world that is accelerating and becoming more complex. It revalues the human dimension in the company by encouraging individual thinking and initiative and gives meaning to teams that are more and more challenged by competitiveness and innovation.
This book is designed as a travel guide. The first part includes all the traditional sections from the ‘front end’ of a travel guide, including some basic vocabulary, tips, and a historical section about some of the pioneers of Lean in Engineering. The journey begins in the second part, which explains a number of Lean Engineering practices in some detail and the best itineraries to develop better products, discussing the underlying intentions and offering advice for implementation. Numerous concrete cases illustrate this part with case material drawn from the authors’ own experiences. Part Three is a brief guide to where and how to get started.
Currently, there are no books on Lean Engineering written by practising engineers who have themselves experienced the adjustment of Lean principles to the business and challenges of new product development. The authors describe tools and practices that have already been widely tested and improved by many engineers with different cultures and skills in the Thales Group and other companies. Lean Engineering as we describe it has thus been able to demonstrate its effectiveness for several years. In addition, the authors describe new unique practices invented within the framework of their activities and which thus do not exist anywhere else (e.g., causal influence diagram (CID), Pull-Scheduling Board).
LIST OF FIGURES
Foreword
Preface
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Introduction
Reading tips
Part one: In the land of engineering
Chapter 1 - Why this journey?
Chapter 2 - The journey to Lean
Chapter 3 - Before travelling
Chapter 4 - Practical tips for the journey ahead
Chapter 5 - A bit of history
Chapter 6 - On site: Daily life
Part two: Map, Territories, Pathways
Chapter 7 - Obeya*
Chapter 8 - Genba Walk***
Chapter 9 - The path to growth and profit
Chapter 10 - The path to knowledge and sustainability
Chapter 11 - SBCE, the Lean Engineering process ***
Part three: Compose your itinerary
Chapter 12 - The customer/product matrix
Chapter 13 - Summary table
Chapter 14 - Enjoy your journey
Bibliography
Biography
Cécile Roche is the Lean & Agile Director for Thales Group, author, co-founder of Lean Sensei Partners, and member of the Institut Lean France. She is the author of several books and a columnist for the Lean Enterprise Institute via the Lean Sensei Women network. She supports several managers on the Gemba, in plants or development teams, inside Thales, and other companies. She is in charge of running Lean training courses in the framework of several schools or continuous training courses, in particular for Lean in engineering. She leads numerous conferences or master classes.
Luc Delamotte is an expert in product engineering and Lean. For 25 years, his career as a product engineer, engineering department manager, and project manager in international contexts has allowed him to acquire vast experience on how to best capture customer needs and how to meet them with excellent products. He is now in charge of defining the framework and the deployment policy of Lean in engineering for the whole Thales Group (worldwide). He supports the entities in their local application of the most appropriate Lean practices (local coaching) and coordinates the lean engineering network of lean experts & correspondents.
Authors Cécile ROCHE and Luc DELAMOTTE extrapolated years of collective experiences, case studies, learnings, and growth in the functional area of Engineering. In their book LEAN Engineering - A travel guide - The best itineraries for developing new products and satisfying customers, they lay out for the reader a cafeteria-style learning within the guide as well as a holistic approach around the important nuances of Engineering/Product Development/Design. The journey of developing people, purpose, problem-solving, process design, and improvements never has a destination but rather a relentless pursuit of growth measured by our work. This can facilitate the reframing of non-value-added activity, that was once a conditioned norm. The authors navigate through their travel guide with multiple points of interest that take a deep dive into the P’s noted above. I would recommend not only to Engineering but to other genres inside an organization to see how the importance of cross-functional groups can align to a true north! Lots of experiences to be learned from the authors as they share their wisdom in a nice visual way to learn.
– Tracey Richardson, Author of The Toyota Engagement Equation Book
Cécile Roche and Luc Delamotte have written a unique book that I would have found very useful when I was employed as an engineer working in R&D and new product development. Well-written and grounded in the fundamentals, the book provides many practical examples that will help engineers correctly understand and successfully apply Lean to engineering work.- Professor Bob Emiliani, Connecticut State University, author of Better Thinking, Better Results: Case Study and Analysis of an Enterprise-Wide Lean Transformation
Luc Delamotte and Cécile Roche describe the levers of Toyota's Toyota: the merging of the technical and social components of a learning organization. Toyota is a company founded in engineering and innovation and one committed to developing its people at every level as problem-solvers. "Lean in Engineering" creates the link between the technical skills required to create customer value and thrive in the future and the social skills leaders need to foster engagement and capability to do so. If you are an engineer, a leader with a technical background or managing technical teams, or a lean practitioner seeking the roadmap to an effective lean system, "Lean in Engineering" is the guide that will enable you to create an enduring learning organization- Katie Anderson, author of Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn: Lessons from Toyota Leader Isao Yoshino on a Lifetime of Continuous Learning
