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Orry Fiume: Lean is a Business Strategy By Orry Fiume, Co-author of Real Numbers: Management Accounting in a Lean Organization - Last updated: Tuesday, June 1, 2010

The way we approached it at Wiremold was to realize that what we call Lean is not an improvement program, not a manufacturing tactic, not a cost reduction tool, but is a strategy.  The purpose of any strategy (lean or otherwise) is to createsustainable competitive advantage. Lean does that by allowing an organization to differentiate itself in the market place through operational excellence.  We realized that if we could reduce the lead time in the market for giving quotes, delivering product, introducing new products, etc, so that we were substantially better than our competition (90%+), we could achieve a competitive ...

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Orry Fiume: lean as a long-term strategy By Orry Fiume, Co-author of Real Numbers: Management Accounting in a Lean Organization - Last updated: Sunday, December 20, 2009

The primary reason why managers think lean is a program to reduce costs is because over the past 20 or so years, companies have been hearing about its various implementations (JIT, etc.) in the context of “eliminating waste”. There is an implicit, if not explicit, understanding that eliminating waste equates to eliminating costs (i.e., cost cutting). However, at The Wiremold Company we understood that the real reason for adopting lean was to create sustainable competitive advantage...and that is strategic. If a company cannot differentiate itself from its competitors, the only thing it can do is compete on the basis ...

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