Dag Swartling

The daily work of Lean leaders – lessons from manufacturing and healthcare

The aim of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of managerial practices and leadership in Lean organisations. The results presented here are based on five case studies. The managers role changed radically with the implementation of Lean production. The focus in managerial tasks changed from managing processes to developing and coaching people. Supporting structures were developed to empower employees and give them more responsibility for daily management activities. These supporting structures included visual control, goal deployment, short daily meetings, two-way communication flow, and a system of continuous improvement. Many leadership behaviours exhibited by Lean managers can be classified as transformational leadership behaviours. However, the need for transformational leadership behaviours was smaller, if the supporting management structure was strong.

Continuous improvement put into practice: Alternative approaches to get a successful quality program

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the existing body of knowledge about what distinguishes effective continuous improvement (CI) approaches and to explain some of the mechanisms which create a successful quality program.Design/methodology/approach – The empirical data were collected from interviews with employees at several levels in seven companies. The companies were deliberately selected to represent different types of resource consumption and outcome from a quality program.Findings – The implementation approaches of the studied companies were classified according to four different categories: parallel, integrated, coordinated and project approaches. Companies that adopt a project approach tend to fail to achieve anything more than minor improvements, while companies that take parallel and coordinated approaches realise significant improvements but use more resources than companies that utilise an integrated approach.Practical implications – This paper illustrates and explains why ...

From Successful to Sustainable Lean Production : The Case of a Lean Prize Award Winner

Many improvement programmes often fail to sustain over an extended period of time. Previous research suggests that a similar set of factors influence the success and sustainability of an improvement programme. The purpose of this paper is to make a distinction between the success and sustainability of improvement programmes, and to identify mechanisms that specifically contribute to the sustainability. In this paper, we study a sustainable improvement programme from the perspective of complexity theories that stress the importance of studying change as a dynamic process of interacting elements and events unfolding in time. We conducted a longitudinal, in-depth case study of a Swedish Lean Prize Award Winner where a Lean improvement programme was studied over 9 years. An improvement programme is successful if goals are achieved and the targeted problems are resolved. Furthermore, the first-order sustainability means the ability to sustain results and the second-order sustainability means the ability to keep an improvement programme alive. The lessons identified from complexity theories, such as destabilising the organisation, ensuring novelty and constant flow of change or self-organisation at the team level, are examples of mechanisms important to achieve the sustainability of the improvement programme.