Two exceptional conferences from two major contributors to the lean movement are organised by the University of Strasbourg and ECAM Strasbourg-Europe.

- Dan Jones, Lean Enterprise Academy: 'Lean as a management system for the future' - 9:00

- Pierre Masai, Toyota Motor Europe, University of Strasbourg: 'Modeling the Lean Organization as a Complex System' (Defense of doctoral thesis) - 10:00

Biographies of the speakers:

* Dan Jones is the founding president of the Lean Enterprise Academy in the United Kingdom. He is the author of numerous reference works on ‘Lean: The Machine that Changed the World’, with James Womack and Daniel Roos, ‘Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Organization’ with James Womack, among others. He is also a renowned speaker and one of the lead organizers of major conferences on Lean: Frontiers of Lean Summit, Global Lean Healthcare Summit, as well as the Lean Transformation Summit. Dan Jones was professor of Manufacturing Management at Cardiff University, then left the academia to launch the Lean Enterprise Academy.

* Pierre Masai is IT Vice-President at Toyota Motor Europe in Brussels since 2005. Pierre Masai integrated Toyota, which is the very organization where lean originated in, in 2005. He has held numerous management positions in the IT domain and supervised the creation of a pan-Europeanlean IT organization in R&D, Production and Sales in 53 countries. He is a member of ICube Laboratory at University of Strasbourg since 2014, where he pursues his research interests on the modeling of Complex System properties of lean, especially around the Hoshin Kanri process. He teaches lean IT to last year engineer students at ECAM Strasbourg-Europe.

About the conferences

* Lean as a management system for the future, Dan Jones

Thirty years ago, Jim Womack and I uncovered a very different management system in Toyota.

What really inspired us and many others to study lean in more detail ever since is the fact that it is a truly people-centric system that engages the creativity of all employees.

What became apparent, however, is that simply implementing the tools misses the point completely, and quickly runs into the sand. That’s why Jim Womack and I called our 1996 book Lean Thinking: our aim was to frame lean as an alternative way of managing, showing why there is more to it than just boards and 5s. Indeed, lean success depends on how these tools are used and on how we learn to change the way we think about working together through using them.

People-centric system like lean offers a promising alternative to financial capitalism. Its responsiveness and its ability to learn, create meaningful work for employees and minimize the impact on the environment represent the most coherent strategy a company can adopt to meet the needs of our time. Our challenge is to build on the shoulders of the pioneers in articulating this strategic approach for the managers of the future.

* Modeling the Lean Organization as a Complex System, Pierre Masai, Defense of doctoral thesis

It is particularly arduous to apply scientific research to the Toyota Way, since the best way to embrace lean is to practice it, which is possibly why there are more books than scientific works on this subject. Many principles of lean also seem at first sight to be common sense, so it is difficult to demonstrate its benefits to laymen by theory only. For example, “Customer First” or “continuous improvement (kaizen)” may seem very familiar and logical to them.

When lean has been applied to other organization types, however, it very often starts with a small subset of the Toyota practices and others gradually come. For example, Eric Ries explains how he was looking for another way to start companies after a failure, got interested in lean, read some books, and started his Lean Start-Up approach, which had a great success. But he essentially started with one thing, put the Customer First and quickly bring quickly a minimum viable product (MVP) to the market, then improve from there. This led to the idea of developing a model with deeper explanation of the various concepts that could be used by whoever would start applying lean to a new field, and help them translate their subject matter expertise into an effective application of lean.

During these three-year research effort between Toyota Motor Europe, the University of Strasbourg and ECAM Strasbourg-Europe, we have developed models and performed experiments to help organizations out of the manufacturing work take advantage of the lean approach. The results of these investigations are presented in this doctoral thesis defense.