Augmented Lean A Human Centric Framework for Managing Frontline Operations

Augmented Lean: A Human-Centric Framework for Managing Frontline Operations is the book that gets the people-dimension right in the transition to smart manufacturing--what some call Industry 4.0. It's the critical lynchpin for success, scale, and speed.The book narrates an ongoing industrial revolution by retracing the steps currently being taken by software engineers to join industrial process engineers and operators to foster a renaissance in manufacturing. It is this renaissance which, in turn, lets shopfloor workers at the frontlines (in factories, along the supply chain, in physical retail, and remotely) interact with real-time information that improves their productivity and happiness. The Frontline Worker threads the next natural evolution of Lean management in the digital age, a message that has gotten lost in all the automation-speak.

Workers will complement machines. Despite popular hype about robotics--important but not the whole story--workers are not all going away for the foreseeable future. Augmenting, not replacing workers, is an antidote to the current workforce skills gap and tremendous worry that mindless automation technology creates across society. Properly rolled out using this guidebook, frontline worker augmentation is poised to reshape the contemporary worker and empower frontline workers to regain dignity and create a billion good jobs in the next decade. However, the communication challenge is tremendous: it's not going to be enough to convince engineering students at MIT that manufacturing is exciting, the message needs to reach the masses.

There's a method behind adapting to and profiting from change. Augmentation is not just a message; it is a methodology. How to augment? When to augment? Which tools to use? How to scale it companywide? How to fit into a small-and medium enterprise? How to pilot and deploy in a corporation or in a regulated industry? How to track progress? How does this new wave of technology impact traditional Lean methods (which are already considered tricky to get right)? Even though technology gets easier and faster to implement with each generation, at the organizational level, you need a playbook. At the process level and among mid-level managers you need exposure to the right use-cases to make your own experiences of success and failure. There's also a great need to exchange good practices. Augmented Lean will provide you with all of this.

Explore the real future of work in this expert tech implementation guide that goes beyond automation

In Augmented Lean: A Human-Centric Framework for Managing Frontline Operations, serial startup founder Dr. Natan Linder and futurist podcaster Dr. Trond Arne Undheim deliver an urgent and incisive exploration of how to facilitate agile processes amongst a millennial workforce that already lives by many of its tenets. The book demonstrates how to abandon legacy industrial technology that is failing modern operations and hindering operational excellence and digital progress. As an executive and leader, you cannot fall prey to hyped-up notions of industry 4.0's factory of the future automation, artificial intelligence, internet of things, sensors, digital twins, and augmented reality fixing every problem. Instead, to truly reduce cognitive load, complexity, and frustrations in the workplace, we must build cyber-physical technologies so that humans remain at the center. Leaders must ensure that the technology they deploy at an industrial scale has fluid interfaces that demonstrably simplifies work and makes operations more flexible without introducing fear, uncertainty, or doubt.

The authors provide:

• A step-by-step walkthrough of the Augmented Lean framework that shows readers when, how, and why to augment your workforce through cyber-physical principles that go beyond both Lean and Agile management practices
• Concrete strategies on how to scale these operational augmentation methods throughout your organization based on real-world case studies of operators in the trenches of manufacturing whose impact far outweighs their seniority in the corporate hierarchy
• Insightful advice for how to use the augmentation framework in small- and medium-sized enterprises where license and training costs are prohibitive when only using off-the-shelf industry 4.0 approaches

A thoroughly practical playbook for augmenting your workforce with the latest cyber-physical adaptations to digital technologies, Augmented Lean provides you with the organizational-, process-, and management-level techniques you need to get the most out of your employees. In turn, as an operator, engineer, or industrial worker reading this book, you will become empowered to be a change agent through no-code interfaces instead of remaining a recipient of endless training demands and ever-increasing technological complexity. Augmented Lean will orient you towards the future with the most effective tools to cut through hype so you can instantly apply your learnings and be productive wherever you currently operate.