Overview

This book is dedicated to the Game of making your product with as few inputs (of all types) as possible, which is part of a bigger game to make your industry sustainable and your organization responsible in the new world of limited resources.

Dedication to fewer inputs is a similarity between this approach to Lean maintenance and other, older approaches. The difference is the reason or driver for the effort. Traditionally the driver is higher profit. Our endeavor is to reduce the use of all resources used to make a product or provide a service. The end result might be the same, but the intention is very different. Higher profits and lower costs of goods sold are the gravy from this process. The meat is being able to produce products with lower and lower levels of inputs, which means consuming fewer resources.

Industry all over the world is getting the message. We want it all! We want wood to build houses and we want forests to visit. We want coal for power and we want clean air; we want low carbon emissions and we want recreational areas after the coal is gone.

In the South African gold fields, a major gold mine is reprocessing their tailings piles because new processes have been developed that can extract gold from the discards of only 10 years ago. Think of the energy and labor savings of not having to mine the ore, or even not having to carry it up the 8700-foot...