Lean Enterprise Institute

05/27/2026

"Moving offshore was a no-brainer — if you didn't have any brains, it was easy to justify it."

That's Jim Womack, founder of LEI, on three decades of manufacturing decisions that looked brilliant on a spreadsheet.

The math seemed simple: lower wages, lower purchase price variance, ship from anywhere. What executives never calculated was currency risk, supplier disruption, lost IP, eroded skills, tariff exposure.

Then supply chains broke. Geopolitics shifted. Inflation soared.

Now companies are asking the right question: What's the total cost of manufacturing in each location?

GE Appliances did those calculations starting in 2012. Since then they've invested $6.5 billion in U.S. manufacturing and became the #1 appliance company in America. Same products. Reshored manufacturing. Lean applied throughout.

But here's what separates GE from the reshoring pack: they didn't just move production back. They innovated how they innovate, how they manage, how they listen to customers.

That's leanshoring.

If your reshoring strategy is just moving production back and operating the old way, you'll get inflation without growth. If you're applying lean thinking to the entire system—product development, supply chain, manufacturing, delivery, service—you get something different.

What's your total cost calculation actually including?

Read the full article: https://hubs.li/Q04h_KXx0

05/26/2026

Our May Leadership Learning Tour just wrapped in Kentucky — four days at Toyota, GE Appliances, and Summit Polymers with 40+ operations leaders from across North America.

What these executives experienced:

* Toyota's Georgetown facility, which just received $800 million to prepare for its second US-assembled EV.
* GE Appliances' transformation in progress — midstream in a $3 billion manufacturing expansion.
* Summit Polymers' heijunka system refined over 30+ years of TPS application.

Together, these three companies represent more than $9.5 billion in recent U.S. manufacturing investment. The tour put leaders on the floor to see the management systems behind those headlines — how Toyota tackles hundreds of problems daily through continuous improvement, how GE Appliances reshored production while building capability, and how Summit earned back-to-back GM Supplier of the Year recognition.

One participant summed it up: "I've read about lean for years. Seeing how team members own their processes and drive improvement at this scale — that changed my understanding of what's actually possible."

Limited spots remain for the November 9–12 cohort. Same companies. Same intensity. Same transformative experience.

Apply to join this fall: https://hubs.li/Q04hDLWj0

05/24/2026

Authority doesn't build dimensional control capability. Competence does.

The most effective transformations are driven by leaders who are deeply technical, who can simplify complex ideas, and who are willing to work side-by-side with engineers to solve real problems. Leaders who build trust not through authority, but through competence, who show, rather than tell, what good looks like.

This matters because dimensional control isn't a set of procedures you can mandate. It's a way of thinking about variation that engineers must internalize and apply to every interface, every assembly path, every design decision. You cannot PowerPoint your way into this capability. You cannot delegate it to a tools team or a training department.

The leaders who succeed at building this capability are the ones willing to sit in design reviews and ask the hard questions. How do these parts locate to each other? Where does variation enter the system? What happens when tolerances stack up at this interface? They work through real problems on real programs, demonstrating how to think about variation rather than just describing the process.

Engineers follow these leaders not because they have to, but because they see the results. They watch assemblies come together cleanly. They experience launches that don't require heroic firefighting efforts. They solve problems at the design stage instead of discovering them during builds. And once they see it work, they believe. Once they believe, they can't go back.

If you're trying to build dimensional control capability in your organization, ask yourself: do you have leaders who can demonstrate this discipline, or do you have leaders who can only describe it? The difference determines whether the transformation takes root or becomes another initiative that fades when attention moves elsewhere.

Show, don't tell. Work side-by-side. Build trust through competence. That's how belief systems change.

Link in comments below to read more ⬇️

https://hubs.li/Q04hDXzX0

05/22/2026

You can't train your way into dimensional control.

Most organizations approach new capabilities the same way: buy the software, send people to training, create a checklist, declare success. Then they wonder why nothing changes.

Building dimensional control capability requires something harder. It requires organizations to relearn how they design products and processes. Engineers must shift from focusing on individual parts to understanding systems. Senior engineers must rethink long-held assumptions. Teams must recognize that working harder will not improve quality if the underlying approach is flawed.
This is uncomfortable work. It challenges the mental models people have relied on for decades. It asks engineers who designed successful products using nominal geometry to accept that a better approach exists. It requires admitting that the problems showing up in manufacturing are actually design problems that could have been prevented upstream.

The organizations that succeed at this don't treat dimensional control as another tool in the toolbox. They treat it as a fundamental rethinking of how variation is managed across the entire development process—from concept through production. They invest in deeply technical leaders who can demonstrate what good looks like, not just describe it. And they recognize that belief system change happens through demonstration, not declaration.

If your product development process consistently produces dimensional issues that get discovered during builds rather than solved during design, the problem isn't your manufacturing capability. It's your design approach. And fixing it requires changing how you think, not just what tools you use.

Read more at https://hubs.li/Q04hF5VT0

05/22/2026

Jim Womack pays tribute to Orry Fiume, the exceptional CFO who transformed lean accounting at Wiremold and beyond. Unlike typical financial leaders, Fiume mastered shop floor details and reimagined how companies measure value and competitive advantage.

Jim Womack pays tribute to Orry Fiume, the exceptional CFO who transformed lean accounting at Wiremold and beyond. Unlike typical financial leaders, Fiume mastered shop floor details and reimagined how companies measure value and competitive advantage.

05/19/2026

What if the quality problems you're firefighting in manufacturing were actually design problems you could have solved upstream?

Dimensional control is the engineering discipline that makes this shift possible. It's not about tighter tolerances or better inspection. It's about designing for how variation actually behaves in your product—controlling how parts locate to each other, eliminating unnecessary float, and ensuring assemblies come together predictably without force or correction.

The impact at GE Appliances has been measurable. Millions saved in warranty reductions. Faster launches. Consistent quality. Engineers and operators both noticed the difference immediately—parts just fell together.

But this isn't a tool you buy. It's a way of thinking you build. The most effective transformations are led by deeply technical leaders who demonstrate what good looks like by solving real problems alongside their teams. Once engineers see it work, the belief system change follows.

Read the full article to understand how dimensional control operationalizes front-loading and turns downstream firefighting into predictable, high-quality outcomes.

Achieve world class craftsmanship through dimensional control.

05/18/2026

Customers don't judge your product by your internal specifications. They judge it by what they can see, feel, and hear in the moment they interact with it. How a door closes. How a control feels. How surfaces align. And in those moments, they make a judgment about everything they cannot see.

This is why dimensional control matters. It's the engineering discipline that ensures the assumption customers make—that the unseen is built with the same care as what's visible—is actually correct. When parts come together predictably, without force, without correction, the difference shows up immediately. Not just in warranty data or assembly metrics, but in the experience customers have with your product.

If you're designing products where fit, feel, and finish matter, dimensional control is not optional. It's the difference between technically meeting specifications and actually delighting customers.

Read more: https://hubs.li/Q04h14rj0

05/15/2026

Leadership negligence is not dramatic. It is incremental.

Year one: someone improvises a workaround. Year five: the workaround is passed down.

Year ten: the exception has become the rule and a new role is created to manage it.

Year fifteen: leadership manages from the scoreboard, not the gemba. They see headcount rise but do not ask why. Year twenty: consultants arrive to reengineer what leadership never examined.

Here is what business process reengineering revealed in the 1990s, and what the AI correction will reveal again: the people closest to the work know the nature of the work.

They know where handoffs break. They know which steps add no value. They know what customers actually need. They know the workarounds that keep things running. They have always known.

But when leadership stops looking at the work, that knowledge stays trapped. It cannot flow upstream to inform decisions. It cannot shape strategy. It just sits there, compensating for dysfunction that should have been eliminated years ago.
Then the correction comes. Consultants map the processes. The workers already knew the map. The workers are laid off. The consultants leave with their fees. Leadership never learns.

Organizations that improve incrementally do not wait for outsiders to tell them what is broken. They involve the people doing the work. They make small changes continuously. They build capability instead of cutting headcount.
The divide is not between companies that adopt AI and those that don't. It is between leaders who understand their workflows and people, and leaders who will pay consultants to explain what their own teams already knew.

Read more
https://hubs.li/Q04f_Jl_0

05/14/2026

95% of GenAI pilots have zero profit and loss impact.

Not 50%. Not 70%. Ninety-five percent.

MIT research shows current enterprise AI efforts are failing to move the productivity needle. Yet 91% of executives still believe they will hit future targets. This is not optimism. This is denial.

The pattern is familiar. Companies are paving the cow paths with expensive technology. They are automating processes they have never examined. They are treating AI as a plug-in solution to workflows they do not understand.

Meanwhile, 42% of companies are missing their 2025 revenue targets. The dysfunction was already there. AI just made it faster.

Here is what successful AI adopters do differently: they redesign the workflow, not just the tool. They are three times more likely to have fundamentally redesigned their work processes before adding AI. They walk their end-to-end workflows. They understand handoffs, dependencies, and customer value. They involve the people doing the work.

The divide is not between companies that adopt AI and those that don't. It is between leaders who manage from the scoreboard and leaders who go to the field. Between organizations that view workers as costs to cut and organizations that view workers as problem-solvers to develop.

The reengineering is coming. When it arrives, the ones who never looked at the work will face radical surgery. The ones who understood their processes and their people will keep growing.

Read the full article https://hubs.li/Q04g0sHM0

05/11/2026

Can your leadership walk your end-to-end workflows and explain what is happening at each step?

From customer inquiry to sale. From sale to program launch. From order to delivery. Do they know where problems surface? Where handoffs break? Where dependencies create drag?

If not, adding AI will not fix it. AI amplifies what you put into it. If you put in dysfunction, you get faster dysfunction.

Eighty percent of AI projects fail or make things worse. This repeats a pattern we have seen twice before: with electric motors in the 1880s and personal computers in the 1990s. The technology changes. The mistake stays the same. Leaders automate processes they have never examined.

The divide is not between companies that adopt AI and those that don't. It is between organizations that understand their value streams and people deeply enough to apply AI to real problems, and those that will face radical surgery by outsiders when the reckoning comes.

Organizations that improve incrementally do not just avoid mass layoffs. They grow. Their people are partners in transformation, not casualties of it.

The reengineering is coming. The ones that see it coming can choose a different path.

Read more https://hubs.li/Q04f_2Gb0

05/09/2026

Modern vs. Lean Management: Where does your organization stand?

Modern Management:
✅ Focuses on vertical authority
✅ Judges managers on financial results
✅ Plans and directs from the top

Lean Management:
✅ Focuses on horizontal value flow
✅ Judges managers on process health
✅ Uses iterative, feedback-driven planning

Organizations that shift to lean management don’t just cut waste—they unlock engagement, speed, and learning. Which approach describes your company?

Learn How to Strengthen Your Management System: https://bit.ly/42dz19O