Most often in retirement I use the MS Office components because of cost, especially MS Excel with statistical options.

In recent years for a manufacturing environment I used the summary and reporting features of the SAP family components.

Leanness has developed over time as a remedy to obsolete methods of six sigma, primarily to use networking instead of time consuming and costly group meetings.

In my own six sigma green belt program lean six sigma resulted naturally from demands of my group members all of whom out ranked me. Not long after that I saw Lean Six Sigma published by experts, some of whom had previously criticized me for departing from the original six sigma program of 1985. Fortunately my green belt manager and his black belt associate were receptive of new ideas and otherwise supportive of lean initiatives.

One tool was called a dashboard where the program could be summarized, tested, reported and updated, with different initiatives compared for cost and benefit. The dashboard looked good enough to a visiting manager that he hired me into my next job with promotion and better location.

Sometimes I claim to have been in the group that developed lean methods, but it became so popular there must of been a lot of other people and groups involved.

Another tool was called score card where the accomplishments were compared to objectives.

With lean there are associated other tools, like mean time between failures, inventory ratios to production, fault tree analysis, Paretto diagrams, cause analysis and preventive actions, plus ratios of payables to receivables.

One lean initiative was implemented in Lotus Notes software. Another was in Excel. In food pharmaceuticals service the CAPA system may be a separate specialized software.

As always the safety component is important to lean systems especially because of the risks associated with conversion to lean methods.