Lean Utifrån tre praktikers syn på begreppet.

Sammanfattning: Lean is one of the recent years most popular methods for organizations to use in order to increase efficiency, productivity and quality. Despite Lean's increased popularity, Lean is still difficult to define and can be explained and described in different ways. Previous studies have also shown that Lean is difficult to implement and challenging to maintain successfully. Knowledge of Lean is viewed as a necessity in the implementation of Lean, which leads to that organizations often chooses to bring in this knowledge through external consultants or other experts in order to implement Lean in their organization. Thus, it is interesting to examine the consultants view on Lean and the implementation process of Lean. The purpose of this study was therefore to investigate the consultants' assumptions about Lean and how the implementation of Lean should be performed in organizations, and what those assumptions are based on. This study is based on three semi-structured interviews with different consulting firms in Sweden. The findings in this study impose that the consultants have a philosophical and strategical view on Lean with some elements of social control. The assumption on that Lean is characterized by a holistic and continuously never ending process. The managers’ ability to create dedication, enthusiasm and motivation among the employees is important during the implementation. Therefore it’s also important for the managers to believe in the Lean concept in order for the implementation of Lean to become successful. Findings in this study show that a coaching aspect is also imposed to be important when working with Lean and implementing of Lean in organizations. Based on these results the paper impose further research on the impact of coaching in conjunction with Lean and implementation of the concept, both with and without the present of consultants.