The current economic climate is particularly difficult for small and medium sized enterprises: As soon as revenues fall, they are quickly under pressure to reduce costs and often this means reducing payroll through layoffs. This in turn reduces their capacity to serve their customers, and risks setting in motion a vicious cycle of further drops in revenue.

It is imperative that enterprises find the way towards real cost savings without hurting their operational capabilities!

This program will help small and medium sized enterprises take essential steps towards the introduction of Lean Management principles and techniques in their organisations, the identification and elimination of wasteful activities, and a significant increase of productivity, thus reducing costs while in fact improving business performance and customer satisfaction.

The successful introduction of Lean Management promises productivity improvements not of 10 to 20%, but by a factor 2 to 5, sometimes even higher!

This program provides pragmatic and easy-to-implement yet leading-edge, coaching-like advice in support of entrepreneurs and their front-line managers who each and every day must respond to customers’ needs and translate these into timely and effective action plans, while at the same time keeping an eye on costs and productivity – always on the lookout for savings and elimination of wasteful activities.

An often-overlooked yet crucial component of introducing Lean Management is the need to change mindsets and organisational culture: it is essential that everyone in the organisation (and ideally including key customers and suppliers) work jointly together at identifying opportunities to eliminate waste and improve productivity, in an open en trusting mutual relationship. That is why this program will devote sufficient attention to this critical aspect of how to develop the necessary attitudes, mindset, and behaviours among all stakeholders.