Search Results

After having successfully implemented lean manufacturing in the 1990ies and lean engineering since 2004, Tenneco Europe expanded lean to its administrative organizations in October 2009. The implementation approach was directly derived from lean engineering previously implemented in Tenneco Europe as this was considered closer to administration processes than manufacturing processes were. A first SAE paper on lean transactional was presented in 2011. This paper covered a vision, a road map and a process to roll out the lean Spirit in the Administrative world. This paper and the papers listed in the reference list provide in detail the lean tools and principles used in lean transactional and engineering. This new paper is focussed on some concrete applications where the lean mindset has been implemented mainly by the finance team supported by sales, project management, marketing, manufacturing and engineering.

Several factors influence a company working culture including its industry, its geographical region, as well as the cultural and the educational background of its employees. Despite these, Japanese companies have successfully transferred a company’s working culture from Japan to other countries [2], so that only minor regional differences in productivity remain. Such transfer is possible with a strong process oriented mind set and working style. This paper examines the change in a working culture associated with the prototyping of exhaust systems in India. That change required a shift from a reactive “firefighting” mode of working to a structured, projectable and reliable working environment. The goal was to achieve increased in-time delivery, higher quality, greater flexibility, more innovation and reduced cost. The same process approach may be transferred from India to other parts of the world, while allowing for country-specific influences on a company’s working culture.