How successful are companies at Lean?

How successful are companies at Lean?

When researching Lean, it is easy to find examples of companies that are extremely successful at Lean, but it is harder to find information about what the chance of being one of those companies is.

In all the years of researching about Lean, I have only seen one study that attempted to tally up how successful Lean is for the companies that try it.

The research said—and this is from memory, so my number may not be exact, and it is certainly a bit outdated—that 76% of companies trying a continuous improvement program fell short of expectations.

There’s a lot of vagueness there. It covers all continuous improvement efforts, and not just Lean. It also doesn’t distinguish between a small improvement that didn’t meet lofty targets, and utter and dismal failure that left the company worse off.

The issue is that there really is no governing body for Lean, and for those that do have a lot of vested interest, it would be a substantial cost to get good data that would likely say that improvement efforts are risky.

My goal is to provide you the tools to minimize the risk and improve the chance of success.