Andreas Pampanelli Professor Lean and Green

One of the main challenges faced by current companies is to build and maintain business in a market and entrepreneurial environment quickly mutates. With the purpose of promoting a continuous improvement culture within the business, Lean is a business practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. The nearly universe antidote to such wasteful practices is what Womack, & Jones, 1998 call “lean thinking”, a method that has four interlinked elements: the continuous flow of value, as defined by customers, at the pull of the customer in search of perfection, which is the end the elimination of wastes. Resource productivity and closed loops provide better services, for longer periods, with less material, cost and hassle. Lean thinking makes a customer-defined value flow continuously with the aim of producing less waste. Together these practices offer the foundation for powerful new business logic: Instead of selling the customer a product it’s perceived as more appropriate, the idea is derived what is desired, considering quantity, rate, and manner. Therefore, being a Lean Director is not an easy task. Much more than creating a new paradigm, it means driving the right changes in the organization for building a new and powerful business logic. Involving people all around the world for integrating this new journey requires much more than tools and techniques but sense and sensibility for understanding everyone’s mindset, ideas for creating a new common approach. Neil has managed me indirectly as a Global Business Process Director since 2007. He is a very knowledgeable Global Lean Executive. Not only his solid technical basis, but also his strong leadership skills, solid soft skills basis, his ability for coaching and his understanding about making business in different cultural environments is driving GKN Driveline Brazil in our Lean journey. With his support we not only understood the beauty of Lean philosophy but also, we are creating the basis for Lean Business Process deployment in Brazil. If managing is achieving results through people, with involvement and strong leadership, Neil is doing it so far with outstanding results.