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The term Lean derives from the improvement methodologies developed, refined and applied to the specific business needs of Toyota. These methodologies are commonly referred to as the Toyota Production System (TPS) or the Toyota Business System. In its entirety, TPS has many techniques of implementation, methodologies for deployment and tools for tactical analysis. To be successful, all of the above must be supported by a management philosophy that creates a culture of continuous improvement. This combination of understanding, maturity and tactical skill, when developed and deployed properly, enables performance improvements through the identification and elimination of “waste”.

Simply Lean Management:

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U

Utility analysis

The benefit analysis (NWA) is a procedure for the presentation of benefits that cannot be captured in monetary terms. It is carried out in several sub-steps: First, the team gathers all the main objectives of the investment that are not quantifiable in monetary terms, among others, in a deductive and intuitive way. This is followed by the weighting of the objectives, which assigns a relative importance to each objective (various methods are possible), basically assigning weights to the system of objectives from top to bottom. As a third sub-step, value measures are now established, which later make it possible to assign degrees of fulfillment to the individual solution alternatives of the goals. The degree of fulfillment indicates the extent to which the specified goal is achieved. Based on this, the team creates an evaluation table of the alternatives, which assigns a level weight only to the objectives in the lowest category. The subsequent calculation of the utility values is done by multiplying the weight and rating. The total utility value of an alternative is obtained from the sum of all related utility values. If there are several alternative solutions, they are listed hierarchically according to their total utility values. Sensitivity analysis is performed only when there is doubt about the correctness or accuracy of the results and when the total utility values of the best alternatives are close to each other. As a final step, each outcome is presented and assessed to justify the decision making. (Source: GPM)