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History of KAEFER’s Lean Journey

It may sound like a cliché, but every jour­ney really does be­gin with a first step. KAE­FER’s Lean Jour­ney began in 2013 while work­ing with cli­ents that ap­plied this meth­od­o­logy them­selves. We saw how well ef­fi­ciency could be in­creased in prac­tice, so the de­cision was taken to start our own lean pro­gramme. But we see it as more than just a way to in­crease ef­fi­ciency. For us, lean is a qual­i­fic­a­tion pro­gramme – in re­la­tion to our staff as well as to our ser­vices.

Seven pi­lot pro­jects later, it be­came clear that lean would be the dir­ec­tion we took in fu­ture. Es­pe­cially since they were not just re­sound­ingly suc­cess­ful, but also fit into KAE­FER’s way of think­ing ex­cep­tion­ally well.
In 2014, the KAEFER Lean Jour­ney was ex­ten­ded to a fur­ther 100 pro­jects and the global Lean Leader or­gan­isa­tion was es­tab­lished. 2015 saw the num­ber of pro­ject grow to 150, as well as an ex­ten­ded Lean De­vel­op­ment Pro­gramme for Man­agers. So far, in ad­di­tion to nu­mer­ous lean pro­jects, we have suc­cess­fully trained over 1,600 em­ploy­ees in more than 35 coun­tries.

Lean is work­ing. Not just for our cli­ents, but for us as well. And KAEFER has be­come known for be­ing an am­bas­sador for lean as well as a prime ex­ample of how it’s more than a pro­cess, but a way of think­ing.