[ABFM] Public Money & Management Call for papers

[G. Frederick Thompson]

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Public Money & Management
Call for papers on
Lean production and public management

Guest editor: Zoe Radnor, Warwick Business School

The pressure to improve the productivity and performance of public services has led to
many calls from industrialists, management consultants and policy officers for the
application of industrial practices to the public sector. 'Lean' is one such approach
that claims to achieve substantial cost savings and quality improvement. But is the
model of Lean advocated by management consultancies and others appropriate to public
services? Is there evidence that it achieves the promised efficiency savings and quality
improvements?

The roots of 'Lean' lie in Toyota production systems, but there has been considerable
development of the concept. The term was first adopted in the 1980s, with claims that
the implementation of Lean practices in manufacturing resulted in using less of
everything (for example raw materials, labour, time etc.) compared to mass production.
Lean techniques assume that all organizations are made up of a number of processes; Lean
then uses a number of business tools to look at these processes, redesigns them to
reduce waste that does not add customer value and to create new processes where activity
is pulled by customer demand.

Recent research and publications have shown that the public sector use of Lean has
resulted in improvements in customer waiting times, service performance, processing
times, customer flow and quality, achieving more for less, generating a better
understanding of the process, better joined-up working, improved use of performance
data, increased staff satisfaction and confidence, and embedding a continuous
improvement culture. Therefore, it if Lean is implemented correctly, it could become
more than just the next management fad.

Public Money & Management will be publishing a themed edition of empirically-based
articles to analyse the concepts, application, implementation and impact of 'Lean'
within public services. Articles are invited that include, for example:

Case studies and evaluations of Lean implementation.
Development of Lean frameworks for public services.
Evaluation or comparison of Lean across different public services.
Impact of, and barriers to, effective implementation of Lean.
How process improvement in general is being implemented in the public sector.
How Lean is supporting a better understanding of operations management principles, such
as balancing capacity and demand, designing processes or systems and cultures of process
improvement and innovation.

There will be a seminar will be on Monday 17 September 2007 linked to the theme issue.

Abstracts up to 1,000 words should be submitted by 31 July 2007 to the edition's guest
editor: Dr Zoe Radnor, Associate Professor in Operations Management, Warwick Business
School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. Tel.: 02476 528202; email:
Zoe.Radnor at wbs.ac.uk