Press Releases

JULY 2005

For Immediate Release

WHEN SYSTEMATICALLY APPLIED TO BUSINESS PROCESS REENGINEERING, LEAN WILL BENEFIT CORPORATIONS

New York… By the mid-1990'-s the wave of corporate restructuring called business process reengineering had become a euphemism for "downsizing". It had started earlier in the decade as an exciting, new way of radically redesigning and reorganizing an enterprise by lowering costs and increasing quality of service. But, after only a few years, according to Michael Hammer, co-author along with James Champy of the best-selling, seminal book on the subject, Reengineering the Corporation, lack of sustained management commitment and leadership, unrealistic scope and expectations and resistance to change prompted management to abandon the still-young methodology.

In Productivity Press' new book, Creating Lean Corporations — Reengineering from the Bottom Up to Eliminate Waste, author Jeffrey Morgan provides a new methodology in which lean principles are integrated into business process reengineering. With this new, sustainable system, large and complex businesses can lower costs and improve quality.

Unlike other books on business process modeling that advocate a top-down approach, Creating Lean Corporations provides specific procedures and real-world examples of how, using a bottom-up approach, employees performing tasks are empowered to create and manage their own portions of the business process. Each task is defined using a task model that shows the input-output relationships between tasks and their sequence.

This bottom-up approach is essential for creating and improving business processes that are large and complex but still efficient. Morgan successfully applied this system at General Motors and was awarded the prestigious Charles F. "Boss" Kettering Award for one of the most important technological innovations of 2000.

Highlights include:

• Hierarchies for managing large, complex systems and processes: Morgan presents a template for all lean organizations that integrates functional (horizontal) and process-oriented (vertical) groups into a single organizational hierarchy where command-and-control is clear and direct.
  
• Process models that define the organization's business processes: A standard method of process modeling allows business processes to be represented and managed as hierarchies. The level of detail increases as one moves down the hierarchy.
  
• A lean, bottom-up approach to business process reengineering: This works much better than traditional top-down approaches on larger, more complex business processes.

Creating Lean Corporations is for all levels of business managers. Another audience is educational and training groups, such as corporate training classes and seminars and college level business courses.

List price is $35.00. Complimentary review copies are available to media contacts by calling (212) 216-7865 or by e-mailing: leon.carter@taylorandfrancis.com.

Advance Praise For:

"By reducing redundant efforts and keeping tasks on schedule, [Morgan's] system has resulted in a 25 to 30 percent improvement in Powertrain's analysis productivity."
—GM Newsline

"This excellent book stresses the all-important but too-often-overlooked systems perspective of business processes as sets of interrelated activities. A hierarchical structure model facilitates the understanding and management of even large and complex processes. 'Optimize the process first and then the tasks' is a central principle that the book puts into practice by applying the Air Force's IDEF0 (Integration Definition for Function Modeling) model to business processes."
—William A. Levinson
Principal, Levinson Productivity Systems P.C.; Author, Henry Ford's Lean Vision: Enduring Principles from the First Ford Motor Plant

About the Author:

About Productivity Press:

Founded to provide world-class guidance for every level of an organization, Productivity Press is unrivaled in publishing high-quality material on lean manufacturing and business improvement.  Our books, learning tools and newsletter, Lean Manufacturing Advisor, are designed to help educate and support organizations in their efforts to implement the advanced management and manufacturing methodologies required to compete in today’s global business environment.