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Unlock the potential of your team: becoming lean is a team project of Olympic size and effort. (Supplier Business).

Article Excerpt
When price and cost pressures result in insufficient profits and survival strategies, companies must find ways to immediately and effectively eliminate waste. Very often, the best solution is to become a lean enterprise. A truly lean enterprise requires performance at "Olympic" levels. Many companies start the journey to becoming truly lean, not all succeed. Here is how to take a company to the level where it can earn the gold.

Pricing and cost pressures have become an integral component of the automotive industry and will most likely never go away. W. Edwards Deming's book Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position states "Failure of management to plan for the future and to foresee problems has nurtured waste of manpower, of materials, and of machine-time, all of which raise the manufacturer's cost and the price that the purchaser must pay. The consumer is not always willing to subsidize this waste." Every automotive supplier of goods and services knows all too well this statement is even truer today than it was when it was written in 1982.

Continuous identification and elimination of waste has become an essential element in the strategy of many of the most successful companies. In fact, as many as 10 years ago, a survey conducted by an automotive OEM identified that the vast majority of their most successful suppliers had fully integrated lean manufacturing as a part of...