| LEC Feb's Letter
Dear friends:
Wish you a healthy and happy Year of Ox!
The global financial crisis has resulted in a worldwide economic slowdown, The North American market was severely impacted due to the consumers lacking of confidence in the financial systems. China’s export business was also hurt because a great amount of PO was significantly cut off. Fortunately, China has a huge domestic market and the Central Government quickly launched stimulus programs to create jobs. It is anticipated that China’s recovery will be faster than that of Europe and America..
Under the current situation, how can Lean Thinking bring values to companies? I would like to address the question from two aspects:
1. Lean is to eliminate wastes from your company’s current processes and to create more values for customers. It does not require large investment and you can drive it with current staff teams. Our experience tells us that a company at crisis is a good time to get employees involved in making changes. Employees want job security; if they understand that the company needs their help to improve cost and increase productivity, I am sure they are willing to support. This will result in a long term win-win for both parties.
2. Those companies that have implemented lean now face less impact in the business downturn because they have less inventories and the know how to operate a low volume and high mix production system. Therefore, we suggest those companies that have not started lean journey quickly apply lean to prepare for other challenges to come.
LEC faces similar challenges; we have taken the following actions to improve our service as well as to develop our staff:
1. We set up a lean case study bank on the LEC website, we will load a few LEC 2008 cases and other examples onto the bank. The purpose is to share our experience and lessons learned with you. We hope you will send your examples to us at distribution@leanchina.org. If you agree, we will add it to the bank.
2. LEC will offer a series of lean training courses at Shanghai to help people learn lean thinking and methods . Our philosophy is to feed you what you need and encourage learning through practice. We will take a workshop style and limit the number of attendees at 20 people per class to enhance two way communications. We will use simulation games to help attendees fully comprehend the tool and can apply it when they return to work. Our technical team will be happy to provide consultation on phone to help resolve issues as needed.
3. LEC will invite subject experts to offer special workshops to address specific skills and tool:
Feb. 25（Wed）：Dr. Jerry Liu will speak on “Program Management – The interfaces among Functional Groups”. Jerry has had 30 years experience in managing auto supplier submission process. His unique experience working at American and Japanese auto companies will help us understand the different requirements from these companies.
March 19（Thu）：Mr. Chiu Wanli will speak on “Build in Quality”. Wanli has had 25 years working experience at a global 100 companies in product development. His expertise is to design quality into process at early PD phase. This is similar to the TPS Jidoka. Wanli will share many case studies to help companies build in quality.
4. We will continue develop our employees to enhance their capability. At the same time, we will take PDCA to improve our processes to shorten project lead time and develop more service to meet your needs.
It is my dream to set LEC as the Lean Knowledge Center in China, We will continue bringing in new development and applications and help you apply lean transformation. I hope lean will help you make progress at this difficult time, we are anxious to hear your success stories
Marcus Chao at Shanghai 2009， 2， 10 |
