Wiebe Nijdam
Lean Coach
Lean Coordinator at Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management
Owner of Nijdam Lean Consulting
Since the 90’s, Wiebe Nijdam has been optimizing processes together with teams and management and being a part of management himself as a former director of operations. His drive is that the workplace can be a much nicer place for both people in the process and management if we are able to understand the challenges and performance gaps better and work towards sustainable solutions by a coaching style of leadership. In the last decades, Wiebe had the opportunity to practice Lean and continues learning by working in various cultures around the world.
Being a Lean practitioner by heart, Wiebe was able to help organizations with optimizing their full value streams. Examples of these value streams are: Fast moving consumer goods (raw material to shelf), high tech engineering environment (from first idea to delivering finished product to the end customer) and automotive (complex supply chains and full lifecycle support). In the organizations mentioned above, Wiebe helped the management to understand the organizational challenges and translate them to practical goals for value streams, departments and individuals (Hoshin Kanri and Kata). In these projects, this systematic approach was leading for starting and deploying initiatives within the organization.
In the engineering organizations, this lead for example to a Lean Product and Process Development approach in which the organization managed to follow fast changing customer demand with higher quality and more accurate product launches.
Coming from a background in engineering and education, Wiebe decided to expand his work area and started to apply Lean within government and healthcare processes. In daily life, Wiebe is now responsible for the Lean program within the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure (major projects and maintenance). Besides this daily job, Wiebe is supporting an organization that is building and operating field emergency hospitals in disaster areas.
Wiebe has degrees in Mechanical engineering and teaching.