Breaking Through to Flow: Banish Firefighting and Produce.

From the foreword: If you want to become truly lean but cannot imagine how to get beyond the fire-fighting associated with constantly changing plans, then this workbook is for you. A growing number of people are recognising that there is a lot more to lean than simply eliminating waste from current processes. But they struggle to see how to redesign their operations and abandon old ways of working. This workbook introduces a new pathway that is helping many organisations to overcome this hurdle and to launch them on the next phase of their lean journey - breaking through to flow. The key starting point for this pathway is to question the batch logic, based on economic order quantities, that drives most planning systems. Batch logic creates a vicious circle where every change leads to a new plan, which in turn leads to further changes and fire-fighting. This workbook describes how it is possible to move step by step towards levelled production and later on to produce in line with cus