Wiebe Nijdam

Lean Transformation Consultant - Netherlands

Wiebe is a senior Lean consultant with over 25 years’ experience in international professional consultancy and has delivered worldwide Lean transformations and led numerous Lean teams across more than 70 global organizations. His background is in engineering and teaching and has supported not only production organizations, but also executive government and healthcare.

For the past 25+ years he has analyzed, advised, coached, and worked from the shop floor up of companies with different cultural backgrounds.  He is familiar and comfortable communicating and working with all levels of the organization and unlocks the full potential of departments, teams, and individual employees from the board room to the shop floor.

Wiebe’s drive is to work with people. His belief is that daily work is performed better and the workplace a nicer place to work when we understand what the challenges are, and the people can address them themselves.

When leading a transition process, he acts as a coach to all layers of the organization.  In this way, the organization sees clear results and improved processes through the enablement of its employees.  He uses a coaching leadership style which is clear in the goals and results to be achieved.  He has personal experience of what it is to lead change, having himself held many management positions, and he brings this experience to his consultancy.

He has worked with international organisations in Scandinavia and on mainland Europe, dealing with issues such as:

• New planning process and better interaction with sales. Creation of a reliable forecasting process
• Creating a flexible workforce
• A change in mindset of team leaders and employees.
• Creating flexible production facilities with the help of Yamazumi techniques
• Creating a daily management system
• Improving supply chain performance

He has worked for a large executive organisation of a state body on ‘Exchange or Renovation’ projects,  to find a new way of working to produce projects faster while still meeting all the legal requirements.

His publications includes:

• Pre-requisites for leveled production, co-author
• Lean in train maintenance, co-author.
• Team & leadership development, author
• More haste, less speed, University Medical Centre Groningen, co-author
• Making Hoshin Kanri work at the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure, co-author.
• A guide to practical Hoshin, author

Education:

• Postgraduate Master Black Belt, Universität Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona 2014
• TPS Executive development mission, Honsha Associates, Japan 2013,
• Project Management, George Washington University, Washington DC, 2004
• Sc. Production Technology, Pedagogical Technical University, Zwolle, The Netherlands 1998
• Sc. Pedagogy, Pedagogical Technical University, Zwolle, The Netherlands 1998

Wiebe has worked in the aerospace industry for many years dealing with quality and low yield issues, issues on availability of equipment and optimizing inventory management.