New Book: Creating Lean CorporationsReengineering from the Bottom Up to Eliminate Waste

Creating Lean Corporations – Reengineering from the Bottom Up to Eliminate Waste (Productivity Press, 2005) revitalizes the original intent of “business process reengineering” and offers a new methodology in which lean principles are applied to large and complex businesses to lower costs and improve quality. Dr. Jeffrey Morgan 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.

Highlights include:

• Hierarchies for managing large, complex systems and processes. Lean organization templates integrate 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: Reportedly works much better than traditional top-down approaches on larger, more complex business processes.

Morgan is a senior project engineer in the Powertrain Group of the General Motors Corporation. He has worked for GM since 1985 and in 2001 received the prestigious "Boss" Kettering award for his role in reengineering the business processes in Powertrain.