The Lean Engineering Travel Guide: The Best Itineraries for Developing New Products and Satisfying Customers

Lean is an essential way of working in a world that is accelerating and becoming more complex. It revalues the human dimension in the company by encouraging individual thinking and initiative and gives meaning to teams that are more and more challenged by competitiveness and innovation.

This book is designed as a travel guide. The first part includes all the traditional sections from the ‘front end’ of a travel guide, including some basic vocabulary, tips, and a historical section about some of the pioneers of Lean in Engineering. The journey begins in the second part, which explains a number of Lean Engineering practices in some detail and the best itineraries to develop better products, discussing the underlying intentions and offering advice for implementation. Numerous concrete cases illustrate this part with case material drawn from the authors’ own experiences. Part Three is a brief guide to where and how to get started.

Currently, there are no books on Lean Engineering written by practising engineers who have themselves experienced the adjustment of Lean principles to the business and challenges of new product development. The authors describe tools and practices that have already been widely tested and improved by many engineers with different cultures and skills in the Thales Group and other companies. Lean Engineering as we describe it has thus been able to demonstrate its effectiveness for several years. In addition, the authors describe new unique practices invented within the framework of their activities and which thus do not exist anywhere else (e.g., causal influence diagram (CID), Pull-Scheduling Board).

Cécile Roche is the Lean & Agile Director for Thales Group, author, co-founder of Lean Sensei Partners, and member of the Institut Lean France. She is the author of several books and a columnist for the Lean Enterprise Institute via the Lean Sensei Women network. She supports several managers on the Gemba, in plants or development teams, inside Thales, and other companies. She is in charge of running Lean training courses in the framework of several schools or continuous training courses, in particular for Lean in engineering. She leads numerous conferences or master classes.

Luc Delamotte is an expert in product engineering and Lean. For 25 years, his career as a product engineer, engineering department manager, and project manager in international contexts has allowed him to acquire vast experience on how to best capture customer needs and how to meet them with excellent products. He is now in charge of defining the framework and the deployment policy of Lean in engineering for the whole Thales Group (worldwide). He supports the entities in their local application of the most appropriate Lean practices (local coaching) and coordinates the lean engineering network of lean experts & correspondents.