The Process of Making a Lean Company

It is not just about calling a meeting and telling everybody that you want the business to get leaner and more efficient.  Words can only do so much and without the willpower and discipline behind it, from everybody up and down the chain of command, it doesn’t have a chance to stick.  So many plans are put into place, so many ideas are implemented and then just start to unravel and slip away because of lack of discipline.  It does not have to be discipline forced on the masses from the top, but a discipline that's written into the processes themselves.  The processes which the production or manufacturing is done should be written in a way that doesn't allow deviation, is not going to allow changes to creep into it to make it less than what it began as.  These changes, these slips from the correct methods and processes will always begin around the edges, slowly creeping in until all of the good habits and planned out methods are thrown to the side and the bad methods and habits show themselves again. 
 And it will happen slowly, gradually, and before anybody realizes what is going on, everything will be lost and all of the hard work will have been wasted and the quality of your product will have diminished.  So how do you keep that from happening?  It is a difficult proposition and if it were easy, everybody would be doing it.  But everybody is not doing it because it is difficult to do and not every company is set up to handle such a task. 
 It takes good men and women, men and women that are willing to change how they were taught to do something and people that know that the new changes are there to benefit them.  It might seem like more work at the beginning of the process, it may perhaps seem more difficult than before, but eventually when all of the kinks are ironed out and all of the growing pains and learning curves are overcome, it's going to be better.  
And it'll be better for a long time and it's going to position the business in a better way to grow and compete on a larger scale.  And that is good for creating new jobs for the community and it's good for the pay and benefits of the workers that are currently personnel.  It also brings a sense of pride and accomplishment to all those involved.