The Toyota Production System, the origin of lean thinking principles, began with the manual worker on the shop floor and revolutionized productivity, quality, and agility. But what about applying these same principles to knowledge workers?

Today, world-class Lean enterprises are extending lean thinking principles to their entire enterprise- including sales, procurement, materials, accounting, finance, product development, engineering, and service. Depending on the industry, these “knowledge worker value streams” may comprise anywhere from 10% (commodity manufacturing) to 90%+ (service companies, high-technology industries) of the work force. This means that the potential of applying lean thinking principles to knowledge work is immense, yet their application in these areas is much less intuitive, and not well understood.

Representative results that our clients achieve with knowledge worker value streams during the first months:

30% - 100% Increased Throughput
30% - 100% Increased Productivity
50% - 80% Reduced Time-to-Customer for Order Fulfillment
30% - 50% Reduced Time-to-Market for Product Innovation

Few lean consultants in North America have experience working with knowledge worker value streams. The practice of several of our LEAN Affiliates specializes in knowledge workers, with an impressive track record of applying lean thinking principles to product development, finance, accounting, human resources, engineering, sales and marketing in a way that achieves rapid, breakthrough results.