Rath & Strong Announces the Eagerly Awaited Rath & Strong’s Lean Pocket Guide

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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LEXINGTON, MA – 3/30/06 – Rath & Strong, authors of the WALL STREET JOURNAL’S Best Selling Rath & Strong’s Six Sigma Pocket Guide is please to announce its new Lean Pocket Guide. Rath & Strong’s Lean Pocket Guide joins a star-studded line up of indispensable pocket guides from the leader in Lean and Six Sigma. Rath & Strong’s Lean Booster program established Rath & Strong as the first firm to develop an approach to Lean that follows the problem-solving DMAIC methodology, and created a groundswell of demand for a Lean Pocket Guide that distilled that breakthrough.

“This is a lean approach to getting meaningful results fast with Lean! Now there’s a practical, time-saving guide to Lean in our famous format that will make our clients, and the Lean market, very happy,” commented Charlene Adair, Senior Associate, Rath & Strong, a renowned “hands-on” leader in Lean and author of Rath & Strong’s Lean Pocket Guide.

Packed with tools and clear instruction, this hands-on guide could only have been created by the firm grounded in process improvement history and experience while being the innovators of the future. Rath & Strong pioneered Lean by helping bring this powerful concept to the West in the 1970’s, created work cells modeled after the Toyota Production System, and became the world leader of Just-In-Time. Long before other firms, Rath & Strong applied Lean to services, transactions, and administrative processes and integrated Lean and Six Sigma.

Rath & Strong’s ground-breaking approach to Lean makes it easy to integrate Lean and Six Sigma, and the step-by-step approach in this guide will make it an integral part of improvement efforts – no matter where your organization is in the improvement process.

Rath & Strong’s Lean Pocket Guide provides your teams with concise, easy-to-access, and hands-on instruction for understanding Lean and implementing improvement projects. The guide provides short, effective descriptions of the most commonly-used tools, never getting bogged down in unnecessary theory and detail. Rath & Strong’s mini-guide breaks down the methodology as it applies to product, services, or transactional processes. The clear steps and critically-needed and easy-to-follow methodology showing which tools are typically employed at each phase make Lean doable in any company. In addition, an index for important terms, principles, and tools make finding what you need instantaneous.

Weighing less than 4 oz., in the mini-size of just 5.5 x 3.9 x 0.4 inches, the Guide is small, slips into a pocket, purse, or briefcase, handy whenever needed.

About Rath & Strong

Celebrating over 70 years in pioneering process improvement methodologies and tools, Rath & Strong is the leading global provider of Lean Six Sigma and Six Sigma solutions. Drawing from our expertise in both technical and behavioral areas, Rath & Strong has helped companies such as Johnson & Johnson, G.E., Siemens, JP Morgan Chase, Northrop Grumman and Quest Diagnostics worldwide achieve lasting change with advances in operations, leadership, culture, and customer connection long before most consulting firms even existed.

In the 1970’s Rath & Strong’s Dorian Shainin played an integral part in developing Six Sigma at Motorola with Bill Smith. Later in the 1980’s, Rath & Strong helped bring Lean from Japan pioneering the integration of JIT and Process Redesign with Quality (or what is now commonly referred to as Lean Six Sigma). Rath & Strong also worked with GE Capital when Six Sigma was applied to services for the first time across the board. Rath & Strong’s full solutions approach offering consulting, coaching, and training creates change that sticks and achieves significant quantifiable results and sustainable competitive advantage.

For more information, visit http://www.rathstrong.com or call (781) 861-1700.