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Cafés, Restaurants and Lean

Posted on 5 February 2019 by Sarah Lethbridge

Lean moves through sectors in waves.   It can safely be declared that the most mature application of lean thinking is within the automotive industry, the industry where it all began! Other sectors are altogether newer to the lean approach however. Most recently, there appears to be a current up-swell of interest in lean within the University
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Services and Standards: Stand Off or Stand Up?

Posted on 5 February 2019 by Sarah Lethbridge

“To understand Toyota’s success, you have to unravel the paradox – you have to see that the rigid specification is the very thing that makes the flexibility and creativity possible” Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System. Spear and Bowen, 1999.  “The specialisation and standardisation of work …. lead to more handovers, fragmentation of
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Economies of Scale vs. Economies of Flow

Posted on 24 October 2018 by Sarah Lethbridge

Often when I’m teaching, I find myself skulking amongst the middle ground of contrasting ideas. Sometimes I’m even perilously perched atop of a massive fence dividing two opinions. Sometimes I’m in the middle ground of contrasting ideas, sat on the fence of indecision, whilst rocking back and forth muttering “it depends”. I think that one
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Human or Chatbot? Declare Yourself!

Posted on 23 March 2018 by Sarah Lethbridge

I’m watching the television right now and after the advert break the programme titles return and a large letter P looms in the top right-hand corner of the screen. Now I know that this stands for ‘promotion’ and that products featured within the programme have paid to be there. So now I’m on product placement
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GDPR-ositivity

Posted on 23 March 2018 by Sarah Lethbridge

I heard the letters G, D, P and R together for the first time in April 2017 at a Breakfast Briefing that the Business School organised about the DVLA’s digital strategy. After sharing the progress that it has made towards reaching 100% of its services being offered digitally, the DVLA’s Service Manager then turned to
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Right to Left Technology Thinking

Posted on 23 March 2018 by Sarah Lethbridge

One of the first things I learned when I joined the Lean Enterprise Research Centre (LERC) in 2005 was the power of understanding that, as work is completed in organizations, it moves horizontally across functions and departments. A strange thing to say perhaps, but prior to that point I’d had job after job where (I
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The Intangible Balance Scorecard

Posted on 23 March 2018 by Sarah Lethbridge

Since Robert Kaplan and David Norton’s hugely successful Balance Scorecard approach to strategic business management, first published in the Harvard Business Review in 1992, organizations have sought to measure a variety of different aspects of performance. While there are many different elements of a business to measure, ‘Quality, Cost and Delivery’ has always been a
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