Lean Manufacturing: The 3rd Generation

Lean Manufacturing: The 3rd Generation by David Drickhamer:

A Toyota executive recently attributed the company's long-term success to "brilliant process management." Such processes are everywhere in business, including office and administrative work, areas where Toyota itself is working on how to extend TPS thinking. This is where Couch invokes TPS2, or "business-process kaizen," and the challenge of dealing with non-physical inputs and outputs and much longer time frames than on the shop floor, such as the three-year product development cycle. Just as kanban cards are a method for transforming intangible information into a physical form, office applications of lean make work and information flow more visible.