Research & Innovation

Great news! Richard Keegan and Eddie O’Kelly have published Lean Service.

Lean is about VALUE … the creation, delivery and retention of value.

In a service business, the delivery of value is very much customer–‐ or client ‐dependent. The client defines what they see as ‘value’, not the business. The most successful service businesses understand this very well and spend much time and effort

working to better understand their customers and to meet their spoken needs and often

unspoken wants. To understand how Lean concepts can be applied to a service business, you need to know a little about Lean Principles, Lean Rules, Lean Questions and Lean Tools. Read on

LEAN SERVICE includes case studies showing how Lean Service has been applied

In companies as diverse as Deutsche Post DHL, DirectSki.com, Grant Thornton, Irish Rail,

Musgrave Group, Openet, Parker Advertising and Thornton Partners.

About the authors:

Richard Keegan is the manager of the Competitive Department at Enterprise Ireland, where he and his team are responsible for the Lean Business Offer, the Benchmarking Service, Environmental Assessments and the Green Start and Plus Programmes, as well as for the Envirocentre.ie and assisting companies to access European support for environmentally-based improvement products. He has written extensively on the area of Lean/Best Practice/World Class Business. His approach of combining benchmarking and Lean tootls and techniques has been adopted by UNIDO to help companies in the developing world to achieve competitiveness.

Eddie O’Kelly is Emeritus Professor of Industrial Engineering at National University of Ireland, Galway. A holder of three master’s degrees in Engineering and PhD in Applied Mechanics, Electrical Engineering and Economics, he worked as a professional engineer in Paris and Strasbourg before setting up a subsidiary of Ulmic s.a in Cork.