Lean Enterprise Self-Assessment as a Leading Indicator for Accelerating Transformation in the Aerospace Industry

The LESAT tool was not designed to be a benchmarking tool, and as such no average industry lean enterprise maturity data is reported in this thesis. The data does, however, allow for the rank ordering of lean enterprise practices. This ranking provides several insights into the current state of lean enterprise transformation maturity in the aerospace industry. First, the industry exhibits its lowest maturity in practices related to crafting and deploying the lean enterprise vision, even though it does exhibit high maturity in lean production. Second, integration of lean in strategic planning (LESAT practice I.A.1) ranked highly, suggesting that enterprise strategic planners are considering lean as one of
their operating tools. Yet, leveraging lean capability for business growth (LESAT
practice II.A.1) and impacting enterprise strategic planning (LESAT practice I.G.5)
ranked low. This suggests that the actual benefits realized with lean are not informing the strategic planning process. This would indicate a potential open-loop management system that "considers" lean in strategic planning, but does not strategically build plans based on the gains that lean is actually providing the enterprise.