Lean Audit: The 20 Keys to World-Class Operations, a Health Check for Factory and Office (Navigating to Results)

This book gives me a lot of awareness and guideline to bring my factory to the next level, especially for what management have to do.In my factory, we started lean activity 3 years ago. We focused on 5S, Waste Elimination, Visualization, Standardization, One piece flow and so on. Most of our activities were limited at Gemba level only. After I finished several low-hanging fruit projects, I need to proceed my factory to the next level. In order to do so, I need to introduce lean concept to whole level, not only Gemba level. I got a lot of awareness and guidline from this book to embed the lean culture to entire functions and job level.Each audit questionnaire tells "where I am now" and I understand which area is strength and which is not. And also tells "what to do next". After I performed this audit, I realized that we have a lot of things to do at management level. The change in management is not easy but it is essential part to bring my factory to the next level.This book is very good for the person who want to know the lean maturity level of your factory and how to bring it to the next level.

This book is a holistic guideline to understand and implement improvements in the operations of a company (factory and service) throw all the supply chain with a hard focus in the customer and in the business, making each area and process a highly performer giving you the opportunity to become a benchmark in your industry developing world class practices.I used it to guide my operations team to have a rich discussion of current processes, methods and business politics with the focus of improve our daily operations to impact the business goals, strategy and customer satisfaction. Also the audit gives you the current status and gives you the key requirements to become a world class company.We have been working since 2013 in my site (global company) with high positive impacts and benefits in company primacies: Cost (Finance), Quality, People, Systems, etc. It helped us to creating a culture of ownership, engagement and long term vision for each member team with tangible and real sustainability savings.

If you are looking for the very simple Guide on Lean, keep searching. If you accept business life is messy and you need to get some structure, you've found the right book.Joerg dissects the business well and helps you do it. It's extremely structured, yet that is what makes it so powerful. The initial 2 chapters are a great guidance on how and when to do the audits and what value it can bring you. Cudos Joerg, well written!

Thanks Mr Muenzing to launch this book. It helps to open the managers’ eyes, to see what the level of lean is in theirdepartment. Very simple and clear message for everybody.If you want to see the real level of lean in your company i strongly recommend this book.

This is a perfect help to see how good you are in Lean. We already start to work based on this approach and the result is shocked everybody. We keep doing this work and i will inform you about the result.

A great book that easily measures the Lean maturity of your company and shows you where the improvement areas are. It will surely help your company to get to the next level and improve in all areas.

This book is an excellent summary about how can we measure my organization. It support to define the baseline and define further action. It's key to develop your operation!

Very helpful to guide myself through on the different levels of LEAN.Easy to understand.Recommend everyone who is interested in continous improvement of performance.

Personally, I was struggling to find something original.. Similarities with 20 Keys to Workplace Improvement, which I myself used as a benchmarking tool - Kobayashi's methodology is acknowledged in references. Quite a number of mistakes which I would not recommend repeating. Kobayashi's benchmarking/auditing took a number of software companies to a 21st-century level, Google around if interested.

YEP my type of book very powerful

Excellent, well structure audit toolkit

The book offers the most encompassing Lean audit system I know. The 20 keys (which are actually 28 because there are 8 specific keys for factory and office which only very partially overlap) represent all major business areas/topics. I conducted the audit in several of our subsidiaries and I never got the feeling that it is missing out any important topics.I was also very positively surprised by the professionalism and effort that was put into the development of this audit which evolved over a decade including the experience gained from working with dozens of organizations. But let’s look at it from the beginning:The book starts with a chapter about the intended target audience and how to read the book. The next chapter covers the underlying theory, an overview of the audit categories and their weighing, a description of the reference points of the evaluation, and the process of how to conduct the audit. The following chapter takes a look at each audit category (called keys in the book) in depth before the audit questions itself are listed. There are roughly 4-8 questions to each key adding up to around 160 questions (120 of which are asked during a standard audit). There are five possible answers to each question. I found the questions to be very encompassing and the possible answers to be quite clear so that most of the times there was no discussion about what the right answer would be. The audit does take some time the first time introduced, due to clarification discussions and usually having to read several answers per question, but it gets faster in the following runs. You can also do the audit online and get your result calculated right away. The remainder of the book provides a guide to the analysis and interpretation of the results, which I found very helpful, a possible certification, a Q&A part, and some other stuff.We have been auditing our companies for a number of years prior to finding this book with self-made audit sheets. To our surprise, we found that we could introduce this audit with only minor adaptations, received very positive feedback for the new system, and so made it the group standard for all subsidiaries.Be aware that the audit system presented in this book is not a quick survey where you get a very rough overview over your company’s Lean level in 20 minutes. It is intended for people who are seeking an in-depth understanding of their capability levels and finding the right spots to tackle. If you are serious about this, this book gives you all the tools you need to be successful without having to reinvent the wheel.

Für Manager, die neu in einem Unternehmen sind, Unternehmensberater und Interim-Manager stellt dieses Buch eine große Hilfe dar.Oftmals können Unternehmen nicht genau definieren, wo die eigentlichen Ursachen für auftretende Schwierigkeiten liegen, um dann gezielte Verbesserungen herbeizuführen.Das Buch "Lean Audit" erläutert deshalb zunächst für Produktion und Verwaltung die wichtigsten Bewertungskriterien (Keys), so dass ein gemeinsames Verständnis geschaffen wird, bevor zum Audit geht.Das Audit selbst ist ähnlich eines Multiple Choice aufgebaut. Das Bewertungsschema ist einfach und leicht verständlich und liefert ein klares Stärken/Schwächen-Profil inkl. Risiko-Einschätzung, so dass sofort Prioritäten gesetzt werden können, um auch mit begrenzten Ressourcen Verbesserungen/Veränderungen starten zu können.Das (Lean) Audit endet jedoch nicht mit der Analyse, sondern geht darüber hinaus, denn die Aufnahme des IST-Zustandes stellt nur die halbe Miete dar. Es muss zusätzlich dringend geklärt werden, in wie weit die Organisation überhaupt bereit ist, Veränderungen mitzutragen (Agility Factor). Auch hier stellt das Buch ein Hilfsmittel zur Messung bereit, in Form eines Fragenkatalogs mit 10 Fragen.Der Agility Factor und das Auditergebnis in Summe ermöglicht nun eine recht zuverlässige Prognose, wie schnell das Unternehmen ein gestecktes (Verbesserungs-) Ziel erreichen kann.Berater und Manager erhalten mit dem Buch eine grosse Unterstützung bei der Prognose gegenüber ihren Auftraggebern, welchen Zeitraum Veränderungsprozesse benötigen werden und das schon direkt nach der Analyse.Die Erwartungshaltungen aller Beteiligter bauen nun auf einen gemeinsamen Verständnis auf, Missverständnisse werden vermieden. Je nach Zielsetzung können nun Ressourcen und Budgets entsprechend realistisch veranschlagt und überwacht werden.Ich halte das Buch für ein sehr geeignetes Tool, gerade (aber nicht nur) für Unternehmen aus dem Mittelstand.Einziger Wehrmutstropfen: Es liegt noch nicht in deutscher Sprache vor.