Thank you for your comments. I’m sure there are some companies who have seen significant increases due to the implementation of lean. I obviously believe lean is effective since I am an advocate for its use.

My point here was to focus on published works that have been peer reviewed. I was particularly interested in this article because they used a control group, which many applied samples do not have/use (for many reasons).

I am sure that depending on when measures were taken, there could be some very interesting results. What I found interesting about this article was that the increases were seen in such a short period of time.

The data here is surprisingly unimpressive. With kanban/DBR pull system teams I’ve been involved with we’ve seen lead time shrink by 40%-90%.

I’ve attended a couple of Lean conferences where folks from diverse fields such as aircraft design and medical equipment design have reported similar numbers.

I wonder if this study you are citing focused on the local “touch time” for the individual (very 20th Century, time-in-motion paradigm) and not on the end-to-end cycle time (21st Century systems thinking, late 20th Century Eastern philosophy efficiency / TPS paradigm)?

David