From Lean Thinking to Lean & Digital World Class: Michele Bonfiglioli on Automazione News

In an industrial context marked by advanced digitization, artificial intelligence, and new geopolitical complexities, Lean Thinking cannot remain confined to the factory floor. It must evolve into an integrated model that embraces supply chain, product development, business organization and people: it is the Lean & Digital World Class.

Michele Bonfiglioli, CEO of Bonfiglioli Consulting, recounts this evolution in the interview published in Automazione News (No. 4, April 2026), 25 years after the publication of “Lean Thinking - Thinking Lean the Italian Way” by founder Romano Bonfiglioli.

What emerges from the interview:

• Approximately one in three companies in Italy adopts Lean Thinking organically, with a concentration in medium and large companies
• Where the method is applied consistently, the results are measurable: productivity increase of 20-30%, inventory reduction of 30-40%, on-time delivery over 90%, time to market reduced by 30-50%
• Only 5-7% of enterprises manage change proactively and with high digitization in Operations and Supply Chain
• Implementing digital technologies without rethinking processes from a Lean perspective risks generating “digital waste”: automation of unnecessary tasks, information redundancy, lack of systems integration
• The Lean & Digital World Class model proposes an integrated architecture that merges lean method and digital tools, following the Sense → Store → Analyse → Display
operational cycle

Lean Thinking remains valid in its basic principles, but it must be interpreted in a new way, within a much more complex global scenario. Its most advanced version is the Lean & Digital World Class - Michele Bonfiglioli

The data cited in the article comes from the research “What's Next in Operations? Benchmarking Study”, conducted by Bonfiglioli Consulting on a sample of more than 100 companies and managers from 22 industries.

📄 The full article is available in the hard copy of Automation News, No. 4 - April 2026.