Exide Technologies Robert Weiner is the Senior Vice President for Global Manufacturing and Engineering for Exide Technologies, the world's largest producer of batteries. He has implemented lean throughout all of the company's 62 factories within a matter of months. Here are some of the questions he answered: Is the lean transformation you're undertaking at Exide different from the lean transformation you oversaw at Pratt & Whitney? Is Exide's lean program the same as Pratt's Achieving Competitive Excellence -- ACE -- program? Is it true that the only way companies start a lean transformation is if they are under threat of bankruptcy? Beyond lean is there another system that could be put in place to save an old-line manufacturing company like Exide? Will you pursue the strategy of outsourcing manufacturing? There are still many companies that are debating whether lean is the thing to do in order for them to stay alive. What do you think? Many companies take five or six years to instill this into their culture. Is it possible to kaizen a culture over night? Is it possible to implement lean all at once? How did you go about making the change at Exide? Do the people who run a process that is producing 900 batteries per line per shift realize that they can be running at 1,800 batteries overnight? What does the old plant manager say when he comes in and sees this radical improvement? Does he say what was wrong with me? Was I a bonehead? What are some of the rewards you've put in place? Were many of the plant managers cognizant of lean? Had they started to hear about it even though your primary competitor Johnson Controls was zooming forward? Is there a good pool of talented lean people to select from? Did Shingijutsu put a lot of people on this? Isn't lean for HR and accounting tougher than lean for manufacturing? Does 5-S work its way into the office environment? Were you surprised by the condition of the plants when you started there? How hard is it to see this materialize on the bottom line? Do you see financial results you can point to as easily as you can point to an improved process? Can you describe Ito's quality system? What are the foundations of the Quality Control Process Charting system? To view questions from other interviews in Lean Machines, Click Here. Click Here to order a copy of Lean Machines.