Abstract

Most organizations adopting lean fail to do so, and one of the improvement processes for it, Quantum Lean (QL), addresses organizational uptake of lean but is worth examining in its own right. The major difference between traditional lean (TL) and QL is that QL chooses to look at all processes as potentially suffering from a time delay that can be minimized, reducing all other waste or resource variables to terms of time. The eight wastes are reduced to their time components, and where an employee's excess motion searching for tools would be counted under TL as excess motion, it is instead put in terms of the 10 minutes lost doing it using the QL model. QL also chooses to focus on the process from the perspective of the product, including time in fulfillment of bringing that product to its final form. QL uses the product path diagram as its roadmap and simplifies all variables bending the path to their time parameters.