What is Lean Technology? In these trying economic times, many people look at the corrections and belt-tightening exercises they've performed to reduce expenses across their enterprises and declare, "We're already lean! How can we get any leaner?" In truth, the philosophy of Lean Manufacturing goes far beyond cost reduction and is actually grounded upon the elimination of waste.

This paper uses as its example the MAX client server back-office coupled with the Synergy web-based front office consisting of CRM, HRM, Workflow, Document Management, Logistics and Financials. The marriage of these systems is a powerful solution, but coupled with a Lean implementation methodology that specifies value from the customer's perspective, we can justify it in terms of increased revenue and throughput, as well as decreased costs. This philosophy is consistent with Exact Software's visionary principles of moving a company's focus from LAN to WAN, transaction processing to document management, and concurrent license to involvement of the entire enterprise; all of which will be discussed in this white paper.