Becoming a lean, mean, learning machine: tricks and tools for smes

摘要

Organizations which excel typically understand their customers, provide high quality and timely products or services, know where the market is going, have a well-defined mission, are staffed with well-trained and caring people, insure their manufacturing and/or service operations have a smooth flow, and react quickly and enthusiastically to change. So how does a company actually accomplish all this? Especially, how does a small company learn to do this? This paper will discuss how organizations learn to become more competitive. In the case of small firms, how they can learn from unique assistance programs will be discussed. The point of view of the owner of a small or medium enterprise (SME) will be taken to understand how the HEMPAC manufacturing improvement process program in Minnesota was able to make substantial gains for some companies and not for others. Additional insights can be gleaned from The Teaching Company Scheme in the United Kingdom and from CENTEK in northern Sweden. By capitalizing on these tools, tricks, and insights, SMEs can become stronger learning organizations, thus becoming more competitive and profitable.