Publications

Someone has finally paid attention to the biggest lean opportunity in your enterprise - the office! While shop floor applications are great beginning to your lean journey, you'll never see the REAL lean path until you address the high cost and leadtimes associated with the office. In fact, your shop floor is held back by the support and decisions made within the office (every minute of leadtime is associated with a decision or action within the office).

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Our Shingo Prize award winning book, The Complete Lean Enterprise, co-authored by Beau Keyte and Drew Locher, is a workbook designed to get you started on your lean office journey. It discusses lean from the perspective of the office, helps you identify office waste, gets you mapping strategic value streams within your enterprise, and shows you how to tie the various value streams into an enterprise perspective of how you support the requirements and needs of markets you serve.

"The Complete Lean Enterprise is an excellent tool to guide the enterprising manager to a new lean process solution. The step-by-step instructions are easy for the beginner to follow, and the lean examples, team exercises, and mapping tips add a credible voice of experience to the manuscript. And, best of all, 'It works!'"
—Kent Sears, Vice President
Manufacturing Processes and Lean Implementation
General Motors Corporation


"Keyte and Locher have provided a valuable contribution for identifying strategic operational value streams for administrative and office processes. They demonstrate that the next generation of waste identification and elimination is in the business support functions."
—Dr. Ross E. Robson
Executive Director
Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing
Utah State University


"This book is a must-read for leaders struggling to remove waste, reduce time, and improve responsiveness in white-collar processes. I expect to see well-worn copies of The Complete Lean Enterprise in offices everywhere — it deserves a spot next to Learning to See."
—Peter Ward
Professor of Operations Management
Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University


"Their method is practical, pragmatic and can easily be transferred to others. This is the book. This is the Rosetta stone for VSM."
—Tom Berghan
Manager, Lean Systems
Esterline Korry


"Beau and Drew have developed a strategic lean tool that connects the value stream management of manufacturing processes to the rest of the enterprise! This tool applies to Office and Manufacturing processes, providing a systematic approach to eliminate waste along the entire product delivering value stream."
—Ron Fardell
Director of Lean
Textron, Inc.