Toyota Kata – habits for continuous impr...

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle What are the habits, or routines, you need to put in place to continuously strive for excellence? How do we create a culture of continuous improvement? In this session you will learn about continuous improvement routines that help you close the gap between your current condition and you desired future state. You will learn how you can probe through the unknown in small deliberate steps. You will also be introduced to the leadership routines to build a continuous improvement...

What information system for the lean com...

Pierre Delort will present the outcome of the study “What IS for the lean company” the CIGREF recently produced. CIGREF brings together 130 French companies and organisations from all sectors with three aims: bring together major companies using information systems, to support CIOs in their jobs and develop a long-term vision of the impact of information systems and technologies on the enterprise, the economy and the society at large. Through this report, the association looks into the benefits of lean management applied to the information systems, it presents...

From concept to social impact (and cash)...

We developped and launched an innovative crowdfunding platform based on 0% loans within 6 months time. hellomerci.com, borrow from those who care, helps people with personal or entrepreneurial projects get loans and energy from their community and the people. How a 4-people team has built and is now running such a complex system? How we managed (and sometimes failed) to connect a highly productive team with a much slower external environment? What are the cultural conflicts that arise when people with a “minimum marketable feature” vision meet people with an...

From push to pull in IT: learning to cre...

Pushing tools to users and complaining that they didn’t use them was easy enough. But when we started asking ourselves whether we were solving the right problems, and how to create value and measure this value creation, it turned out to be a rough path. Learn from Faurecia IT’s experience on this matter, and how IT can progressively move away from being a commodity provider to become a business partner. Faurecia is the 6th automotive equipment supplier worldwide and IT has to support Just in Time plants, Product launches, Month end closes, Purchasing processes...

Lean Data Center: A Telco Experience

Service Providers are complex organizations with several departments like IT, Service Support and Innovation. Andrea shared lessons from several Lean cases within Telecom Italia, the Italian leading Telco Service Provider. The experiences regard the Lean Data Center initiative and improvement of the Product Service Delivery and Service Assurance Processes. Andrea presented the approach he used and how he notably tailored Lean tools to a data center environment, the impact on people and the results he obtained. Specific issues of service environments were highlighted such...

Lean at support functions: from steering...

We hear a lot about optimizing (horizontal) value stream. However, the horizontal flow is quite determined by the efficiency of (vertical) support functions like HR, Finance, Quality, Purchasing, Staffing, etc. We decided to not accept it as given constraint and dig into it by triggering Lean@SupportFunctions initiative. We aim to improve the integration of the internal flow into the value stream and make the internal support functions value driven and business aware. In this presentation we share the results and experiences of applying the same Lean approach to the...