Please note this article was published before OEE Consulting and gobeyond joined forces to become Gobeyond Partners.

In a new initiative The Lean Management Journal (LMJ) has published The Lean Top 25; the aim to profile and celebrate talented people at the forefront of Lean. The LMJ wanted this list to reflect the talented individuals making great contributions to their businesses through Lean.

Nominations were received from across Europe and the final top 25 were chosen for their work in one of three categories: championing, publicising or innovating Lean. OEE Consulting nominated a number of our clients for this list and to our great pleasure 5 made it into the top 25.

The occasion was marked at the LMJ’s Annual Conference this year in Amsterdam 8-9th July.

We would like to congratulate our nominees in their success.

Mark Webb – Hewlett Packard– Having been involved in over 250 Lean implementations worldwide, Mark is one of the most passionate leaders involved in Lean. Fundamentally, Mark recognises Lean is part of every function and that each function serves the customer both directly and indirectly.

Richard Weber – Visa Europe – Richard, and his team have, in less than one year, established an improvement function in Visa Europe. He has already achieved a track record of success, building a roadmap for Lean maturity for the organisation and engagement and influenced senior leadership in supporting the adoption of Lean thinking in all areas of the business.

Angela Cox – Compass UK&I – At the forefront of the application of Lean within the management services, Angela has been championing the improvement to customer services through waste reduction. Angela has worked tirelessly to ensure Lean is fully understood and its benefits applicable to the needs of the business. This has provided a strong base for the development of tools and techniques applicable to the cleaning and food services areas.

Vicki Wharton – Virgin Money – Vicki delivers a combination of customer, colleague and efficiency benefits actively supported by a wave of Lean advocacy across all stakeholders groups for which such engagement Vicki is relentless in creating. The results Vicki achieves are significant and create a Lean culture that lives in the DNA for customer to experience.

Sue Mackenzie – P&O – Over the last 18 months Sue has led a program to develop an internal ‘improving customer experience’ team within the organisation. Sue’s drive to improve has positively impacted the P&O customer experience whilst simultaneously improving the profitability of the company. The success of this work has ensured the improvement methodology is designed into the P&O’s future structure and ways of working.