I overheard a conversation the other week at a between a couple of people who were talking about lean. Naturally, my ears pricked up and I just had to eavesdrop a little bit. They were making a list of their 'lean projects' they had completed already, which was quite a list. They were then going to set their sights on their next 'lean project'...

It's not news that when you have a bottleneck in your process you have a problem, backlogs build up, sales don't go out on time, customers get frustrated and cash flow starts to suffer. Identifying your bottlenecks and understanding the value of them then is important, so why don't more people pay attention to them? Moreover why isn't more tim...