Jim Womack

Books

• Gemba Walks:
  This book complies Womack's essays on the practice of lean and adds some additional context to the essays.

Articles

• A Lean Walk Through History   view details
  "Once you are sensitized to the depth of lean history, along with its many advances and setbacks, it's easy to begin filling in some of the other milestones: By 1765, French general Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauval had grasped the significance of standardized designs and interchangeable parts to facilitate battlefield repairs. (Actually doing this cost-effectively in practice was another matter and required another 125 years.)"

• Going Lean in Health Care   view details
  "Lean principles hold the promise of reducing or eliminating wasted time, money, and energy in health care, creating a system that is efficient, effective, and truly responsive to the needs of patients ? the 'customers' at the heart of it all."

• The Dramatic Spread of Lean Thinking   view details
  "I am delighted with the spread of lean thinking far beyond the factory and far beyond the high-wage economies to every corner of the world and to every value-creating activity."

• Lean Manufacturing Visionary Jim Womack On Frontiers Of Lean Thinking   view details
  "by bonus systems motivating sales staff to make the month or make the quarter and producing a wave of orders at the end of the reporting period. A better approach to these problems is to revamp the bonuses so they are rolling averages rather that don't e

• Lean Consumption   view details
  "Lean production transformed manufacturing. Now it?s time to apply lean thinking to the processes of consumption. By minimizing customers? time and effort and delivering exactly what they want when and where they want it, companies can reap huge benefi

• Teaching the Big Box New Tricks   view details
  "The consequence, in terms of performance, is remarkable. Total "touches" on the product (each of which involves costly human effort) have been reduced from 150 to 50. The total throughput time, from the filling line at the supplier to the customer leavin

• From Lean Tools to Lean Management   view details
  "Lean tools are great. We all need to master and deploy them, and our efforts of the last 15 years to do so are not wasted. But just as a carpenter needs a vision of what to build in order to get the full benefit of a hammer, we need a clear vision of our

• Jim Womack podcast on Lean in China   view details
  Jim Womack talks about the state of lean manufacturing in China on the lean blog.

• Machine Revisited   view details
  Podcast of Mark Graban interviewing Jim Womack; discussing the reissue of Machine that Changed the World: "the biggest disappointment... was to have people tell me it was a g

• Why Toyota Won and How Toyota Can Lose   view details
  "Toyotas great risk, the way it can lose, is that its new managers and the managers in its new suppliers will revert to the old, mass-production mentality of the companies or schools they have come from. If this happens, Toyotas management performance w

All articles by Jim Womack

Web sites

• Lean Enterprise Institute
  "We carefully develop hypotheses about lean thinking and experiment to see which approaches work best in the real world. We then write up and teach what we discover, providing new methods for organizational transformation. We strive to answer the simple question of every manager, "What can I do on Monday morning to make a difference in my organization?" And, by creating a strong Lean Community through our website and public events we try to give managers the courage to become lean change agents."