Best Photos from Europe Lean Tour

Here are some of the best photos from our recent Europe Lean Tour.  We had a blast visiting several companies and meeting some exciting people who made history.  We look forward to taking another group of people in 2012.  Thank you to all who participated or assisted in some way at this event.

The entire album can be found here:

Europe Lean Tour May 2011

All Videos Europe Lean Tour

We posted our Europe Lean Tour throughout the program, but to make it easier for you to find all 4, we've posted all of them below. If you haven't watched them, please take a look!

 Day One - Bosch and Porsche



Day Two - Mercedes



Day Three - BMW



Final Day - Lamborghini and Ducati

Europe Lean Tour Italy Final Day

This is the summary video of our final day on the Europe Lean Tour program. We visited two exotic manufacturers - Ducati and Lamborghini.

Take a look!

Europe Lean Tour Photos May 2011

We apologize the for delays in getting our photos and videos up on our site, due to the slow internet connections in Germany and Italy.  We are now back in North America and will provide you with even more coverage from our highly-praised Europe Lean Tour.

Here are 400+ photos from our entire trip, starting in Germany and ending in Italy.

Please note that all photos are properties of LSI.  Europe Lean Tour participants may download any of the photos posted.  For all other interested members, please ask for permission before using the photos for any commercial or business use.

Europe Lean Tour May 2011

VANCOUVER--Summer Greenbelt for Operation Kicks Off

Our last Greenbelt program for the first half of 2011 kicked off last week with 16 participants. After they receive their "Intro to Lean" training during the first two days, they moved on to visit a local energy/battery company for a three-day hands-on 5S Kaizen training. We received many great feedback from our participants that "5S Kaizen" not only applies to the business environment, but to their personal lives as well.

The group will go through their "life-changing" experience over the following three months;

Module 1: May 9-13 (with three-day 5S Kaizen Blitz)
Module 2: May 30-Jun 3 (with three-day Cycle-Time Reduction Blitz)
Module 3: Jul 4-8 (with three-day Lean Office Kaizen Blitz)

Europe Lean Tour BMW Video

We apologize for the delay in getting our videos to our site, due to extremely slow internet connections at the hotels we've stayed in.... But finally, we have day 3 BMW video up and running!  Thanks again to Master Blackbelts for making this possible.

Europe Lean Tour - Italy Day

Today was our final day of Lean Benchmarking Tour. We began our day at Ducati, the legendary Italian motorcycle manufacturer - then we toured the Lamborghini factory and museum.
Italian motor companies are famous for their passion, and these two companies are leading the emotional charge.

Ducati as a company is focused on 'the rider' and the high performance factor of the bikes. During high season, they're producing 220 motorcycles per day, half of that in fall and winter.

Motorcycles are assembled on four production lines, each line focused on one family of bikes. Since 1990 their quality has increased steadily, from engine defects over 5% coming off the line to under 1% today.

Lamborghini currently operates two assembly lines, one for the Gallardo, and one for the soon to begin production of the Aventador – Lambo’s newest top-range vehicle which features 6.5 litre 700 HP V12 engine.

The Avantador has a carbon fibre cockpit and roof. When it's complete, it weighs only 1535 Kg. We were very fortunate to see the preproduction of the Aventador.

Comparing the two lines, the Gallardo line has 24 assembly stations, and the new Avantador has 10. They are only producing 6 Gallardo’s a day, and expected to produce about 3 of the Aventador per day when the production is up and running fully.


Duing this preproduction model, they are investing a tremendous amount of time to fine tune the assembly of the Aventador. The quality is evident in every part of the car. It takes 10 cow hides to complete one interior!



The lines themselves are immaculate, and 5S is certainly a way of life at Lamborghini. There are also many evidences of lean, such as kitting process, Kanban, and standard operating procedures posted where they are clearly important.



Each new car gets test driven 50-60 kilometers before customer delivery.



After the plant tours, we were off to the Lamborghini factory museum and the family museum, where we delved deeply into the company's history and saw more incredible products made by Lamborghini, including tractors, pumps, a helicopter and of course the original Lamborghini Countach.



We were very fortunate to meet Favio Lamborghini, the nephew of the founder. He personally showed us around the family museum and explained in intricate details how Lamborghini built its empire.

Next Visit: BMW World and BMW Factory

We began our day at the German landmark building BMW Museum, followed by a brief spin through BMW World where they highlight their current and future technology. As the landmark museum is historically important, the recent renovation challenged architect Karl Schweitzer because he could not change the exterior walls.

The museum had displays of BMW's most famous product and technologies. Everything from their first products, the 1917 3A airplane engine, 1926 R32 motorcycle (with still being used today shaft drive), right up to the Andy Warhol painted 1979 M1 Gruppe were available for us to see and enjoy. This car was part of 17 art cars that were shown for the very first time in history!

Then we went to visit the BMW factory. Built in 1922, the factory is in the midst of a renovation, still operating, but clearly under construction.
Engine assembly area had new line in the midst of being installed - it will produce inline 4, V6, V8, V12 for Rolls Royce Phantom.

This factory produces engines for BMW plants around the world. It’s the only BMW plant that produces both engines and cars under the same roof.

The new inline 4 will replace the inline 6, produce the same BHP, with 15% less fuel, and 50 less kg.  A new stamping show was also being constructed. It will add 50% capacity while using 15% less power. The press shop stamps 20 types of steel 24 hours per day producing 100,000 parts per day.

It's rare to tour a painting area, so we were lucky to be able to see this special process. Water based paint is used…the newer formulations weight has been reduced by four kg: from 12 to 8 kg worth of paint in each car. 450 liters of water is used to paint each car.
It was interesting to see the robot paint the car, open the door, paint the inside, and then close the door!

Metallic black accounts for 23% of BMW's sales currently.

Next up, Lambhorgini and Ducati....

Thanks to Master Blackbelts Kevin Wack and his team for this contribution

Europe Lean Tour Day 2 Video

Our summary video from day 2, which is a "Mercedes" day.  A big thank you for Janka who created the video.

Europe Lean Tour Day 2 Mercedes

From luxury to sporty to becoming Green...


From the first 4-wheeled automobile in 1886 with a top speed of 18km/hr to the latest Mercedes
sports car with a top speed of over 400 km/hr...

From cars and trucks, to ambulances and police station wagons, to buses and winter-service equipment...

Innovation and imagination is limitless at Mercedes-Benz and what we need in an ever-changing market.

Watching the evolution of Mercedes-Benz at the Mercedes-Benz Museum was a thrilling experience!

After lunch at the museum, we visited the Mercedes-Benz plant at Sindelfingen.  With an annual production of 460,000 cars, this is Daimler's largest production plant.  It produces the C-class, E-class, E-Saloon, CLS, S-class, CL coupe, SLS AMG, S-Pullman, and Maybach. Maybach production is only 350-450 per year.

Our tour included the welding, final assembly and press shops. This is a highly automated production line, especially in the welding shop where the robots weld, measure and recalibrate all by themselves (~99% of the work is automated with 600+ robots) with 2/100 requring rework at a 0.1 mm tolerance level.

Have you ever seen auto parts being GLUED on an assembly line?  At Mercedes we saw 108 metres of glue line, being performed by robots.  The press shop produces 15000 parts in 7-8 hrs and consumes 160k tons of steel and 80k tons of aluminum per day. No wonder this plant has its own fire station, with 80 firemen and 20 fire trucks, and consumes 1.5 mMkw of electricity per day.  That's equivalent to the consumption of a city of 90,000 people.  Nevertheless, the line operators at Mercedes-Benz take a five minute break every 55 min.  The average age of the workers is 45 years.

It was also interesting to see some Lean tools being applied - huddle meetings, Kanban, A3 Problem Solving, andons, shop floor scoreboard, etc. 

Towards the end of the tour, the chatter amongst the group was interrupted when we walked by some brand new Mercedes SLS models. Apparently, there are only 25 of them produced per day at a takt time of 30 minutes (as compared to 72 seconds for a c-class and 2.5 minutes  for a S-class). To round out this exciting visit we were treated to a preview of the SLS Cabriolet!

After a day of Benz, we took a smooth ride to Munich on the ICE train.

Join us tomorrow for an overview of our visit to BMW.

Europe Lean Tour Video for day one

And here are the highlights from the Day One of the Europe program. We want to thank the Master Blackbelts candidates Michael, Janka, and Jeff for the creation of the video.

Blackbelt Spring Program Graduation!

Yes, they did it! Last Friday, 17 participants successfully graduated from Lean Sensei's  top-tier four-module program designed to create the most advanced lean advisors. We congratulate each participant for their hard work and achievements throughout the program. We are also confident that they have now become even stronger faciliatators for their companies. Good luck to you all with your on-going lean journey!

Europe Lean Tour Day One

We bring day-to-day updates from our LSI Europe Lean Tour program.  The blog updates are being written by our Master Blackbelt students.  First day update is from Kevin Wack:

Stuttgart Germany

Many of us came in early yesterday to tour the Porsche museum. Not only are the cars amazing, the museum itself has great architecture - Fast, sleek, and modern, just like in a real Porsche vehicle.

After an early, though somewhat heavy lunch, (hello Germany!) we all boarded the bus and headed toward Bosch. Bosch is a tier-one supplier to many of the European auto manufacturers…. it produces high-end electronics and auto components in addition to the more retail oriented products we see every day: tools, appliances and electronic components.

The Bosch factory we toured produces pumps and injectors for diesel engines. We were fortunate to have a number of key supervisors and managers from each of the areas in the facility. Visual communication is very evident and of high quality - all of the participants were furiously note taking through the entire session.
A great aspect of this tour is the learning about lean and how it applies to their system. These tours bring real clarity to the gap that exists day to day in our regular workplaces.

Porsche. Porsche. Porsche.
Hard to describe a tour of one of the premier sports car companies in the world.

Many people don't know that in the early 1990's, Porsche was struggling financially, and the story goes that they invited some folks in from Toyota to help them turn around their operations. The Toyota people found racks and racks of inventory, much of it obsolete. They helped Porsche adopt Lean principles, and touring through today it is easy to see the folks at Porsche are great students!
How about this? 0.8 days of inventory; V6, V8, different colors, 911, 911 Caymen, 911 Carrera,911 GTS 911 speedster, 911 Turbo, Boxster, Boxster R's, all produced on the same line. Wow.
In the engine room over two lines we saw them produce the flat 6 flat 4, V6, and the unbelievable V8! We see that they work with their vendors to find a better way improve their processes like reducing the number of parts and while increasing strength and reducing the amount of pressure on the part.

Just like the cars, our tour guides were absolutely terrific. They had answers to all of our questions, all '534' of them over the two hour tour period.
Our schedule this week is very tight, and we invite you back for our updates over the next few days.

Europe Lean Tour Starts Today

Many of you have heard of, or participated in, our Japan Lean Tour. But did you know that LSI takes participants to visit and see lean in action in Europe as well?

But more interestingly, for 2011, we are organizing the European Lean Tour as an alternative to our popular Japan Lean Tour. The Japan Lean Tour will continue to be offered in spring and fall of each year.

Students in our Master Blackbelt program have visited Europe in previous years. Now for the first time, we have made tentative plans to offer this lean tour as an Executive Certification Program from May 9 to 13th.

Included in the tour will be visits to the Porsche and BMW factories in Germany, as well as a factory tour to Lamborghini in Italy. 

The tour highlights include:

- Porsche Museum and Porsche Factory Tour, Stuttgart
- Mercedes-Benz Museum, Stuttgart
- BMW Museum and BMW Factory Tour, Munich
- Lamborghini Museum and Lamborghini Factory Tour, Italy
- Ducati Factory and museum Italy
- Optional city tour Florence, Italy

For those who love to learn by actually seeing and experiencing a "lean" plant, you will be amazed at how lean these places are. In particular, we were surprised by the number of lean practices in place at the low-volume Lamborghini factory. On our last trip to Lamborghini, we had the privilege of meeting the nephew of the Lamgorghini founder. We'll do our best to arrange this meeting again.

For many of us, this was one of those special moments in life - particularly if you love cars!

Blackbelt Spring Program--Final Presentations

Today, 15 Blackbelt participants presented their final presentations. Our Blackbelt program participants are required to deliver final report outs to summarize their entire Blackbelt journey. While most organizations may simply ask their students to prepare powerpoint presentations, Lean Sensei asks for something more--much more. We request each Blackbelt to "wow us" and deliver "a unique and unexpected" final report.

The result was a crazy day of spectacular presentations, filled with surprises ranging from "mad scientist" theme, kimono-dressed presenters, to golf simulations and everything in between.

Take a look at the short video clip to get a feel for how different Blackbelt presentations are from the norm.

VANCOUVER Greenbelt for Operations--2nd Module

This week, 22 participants are having their three-day cycle-time reduction kaizen blitz at a "green" energy company. They have been divided into five groups and each must come up with a plan to reduce "cycle-time" in areas the hosting company has specified. As you can see from the photos, they are all working towards important goals of reducing process time.

Blackbelt Final Module this week!

 Our Blackbelt Certification class is finally reaching its fourth module, to be completed this week! The group just started a challenging "extreme makeover" assignment at a growing food company which provides the famous TAZO tea to Starbucks.

Brainstorming and visioning have resulted in four teams which began problem solving yesterday. Best wishes Blackbelts!

Greenbelt Toronto Spring 2011 Graduation

We are proud to announce that all 14 participants of the Toronto Greenbelt program successfully graduated last Friday. Congratulations to you all for completing the program! The real "lean journey" begins now.

We wish you all the very best!

              Below are photos of the two Greenbelt Grad speakers Sheila Carr and Alex Damnjanovic.

Lean Reference Book Recommendations

Basic recommendations for people who are just starting out with lean....