Learning with Lean: Unleashing the Potential for Sustainable Competitive Advantage

The toughest Lean journeys are those taken in organizations that have achieved long-term success. Processes and people become fixed in their ways and exhibit a natural resistance to change. But, regardless of how well your organization is performing, unless you have a sustainable competitive advantage, you are at risk.

Examining the performance gap between good organizations and great ones, Learning with Lean: Unleashing the Potential for Sustainable Competitive Advantage explains how to use Lean as a learning vehicle for achieving and sustaining a competitive advantage.

Helping you better understand the current state of your organization, the book outlines a series of five simple phases for developing an architecture and implementation plan to transform your organization’s performance. These five phases fit neatly into a closed-system model that has similarities to the Plan-Do-Check-Act quality model. The model is simple, easy to communicate, and easy to implement—Assess, Plan, Prepare, Do, and Learn.

• Supplies a brief overview of Lean tools
• Provides an understanding of the Voice of the Customer as a focusing engine
• Covers measurement and goal setting
• Illustrates the dynamics of organizational change
• Explains how to boost learning through Lean

The authors guide you through the deployment of training and the implementation of new knowledge and skills around Lean. In addition, they also explain how to find and improve on the areas where waste exists so your organization can reinvent the way it learns.

Effective management techniques recognize the need for balance, and this book is no different. Helping you pinpoint where those balances and dichotomies exist, it arms you with powerful techniques to manage these challenges and to transform your organization into a change-hungry Lean learning organization with a sustainable competitive advantage.

About the Authors

James T. Zurn is the director of Lean Business Process Improvement for QLogic Corporation in Aliso Viejo California. He is responsible for driving corporate-wide LEAN adoption, use and impact. He has over 34 years experience in quality, reliability and design engineering with QLogic, Intel, Storage Technology, Xerox, AT&T and Fujitsu.

Jim holds Bachelor and Master’s degrees in engineering with concentrations in statistics and operations research from CCU in California. He’s been a Senior Member of ASQ, SME and IEEE and is an ASQ Certified Quality Engineer and Certified Reliability Engineer. He is an SME Certified Manufacturing Engineer in two disciplines (Manufacturing Management and Manufacturing Systems). Additionally, he is an accomplished, GE-trained, Six Sigma Black Belt. He holds registration as an ISO9000 auditor and is pursuing certification as a SEI CMMI lead assessor.

He is serving his fourteenth year on the Board of Examiners of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award as an Alumni Examiner, and is the founding chair and Judge of the Arizona Governor's Award for Quality program. He was Presiding Judge for the U.S. Air Force’s SECAF Quality Award program and was active in the Air Force’s quality journey as one of five civilian members of the USAF Chief-of-Staff’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Quality Assessment. Additionally, he was Lead Examiner in the U.S. Army’s Centurion Quality Award program and a Senior Examiner in the U.S. Dept. of Labor Workforce Excellence program. Jim is the Chair of the AZ Governor’s Advisory Council on Quality and was a member of the joint private/public Venture Teams with Arizona’s ADOT (Transportation) and ADES (Economic Security) divisions.

He is widely published with over credits in publications such as; IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Quality and Reliability Engineering International and ASQ’s Quality Engineering.

Perry Mulligan is the Senior Vice President of Operations for QLogic (since 2007), where he is responsible for all aspects of the manufacturing and delivery of products to the customer in addition to overall supply chain design and manufacturing strategy. He has over 25 years of experience leading Operations and Supply Chain Management.

In the years prior to QLogic Mr. Mulligan was at Solectron where he held the position of Senior Vice President Supply Chain Management and Chief Procurement Officer, responsible for establishing and executing the overall materials and supply chain strategy. Additionally, he is a member of the Board of Directors for Microvision since January 2010.