Lean thinking put to action

This paper describes how the identification of value creating activities and activity flow of a regional graphic arts and mail service provider has helped to facilitate the achievement of ISO 9000 compliance. The paper illustrates how to organize an industry/academic joint project effort to streamline and standardize the value creating activities business processes. The paper concludes with a discussion of how company staff involvement lead to internal ownership of results while establishing an internal capability for future business process improvement and TQM efforts