What

A Community Research Project

How to formulate, calculate and articulate lean’s bottom-line benefits.

As lean and other continuous improvement tools and methodologies continue to migrate out of discrete product manufacturing and into process industries (like oil refineries and chemical plants), as well as hospitals, insurance firms, banks, and other service companies, there’s an opportunity for such organizations (and for manufacturers as well) to move faster and achieve greater returns. Provided they can learn from the mistakes and missteps that others have made.

The objective of LeanROI.org is to save wasted time, effort and expense, and maximize the benefits that organizations reap from their lean initiatives.

LeanROI.org will help managers and executives like you design, estimate, realize, calculate and articulate the ROI from their process improvement efforts. We will help change leaders articulate and sell their vision (a unique challenge in sectors that are just now becoming familiar with lean thinking and tools), and thereby win and defend resources from the arbitrary budget ax.

To accomplish these goals we will be posting current knowledge, advice, examples, and tools for estimating and measuring the economic return from process improvement efforts. We will also be offering advice and examples for how to communicate those estimates and metrics in terms that can be understood and supported by executives, board members, employees and other stakeholders. Features will be added to this website as they are pulled by members of the LeanROI.org community. Possibilities include:

• Podcasts of interviews with lean experts
• ROI case studies at the facility and enterprise level
• Commentary from industry practitioners
• And whatever else we can dream up.

The end result will be the fully searchable content of this website, and a distillation in some form of the best ideas and advice that the LeanROI.org community offers. It may take the form of a formal research report, or it may be a book, or an electronic publication of one kind or another. It could even be a project framework or a set of process guidelines for maximizing your lean efforts.