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Most lean stories come from manufacturing, healthcare, or large enterprise rollouts. This one is different. It comes from a public library in a fast-growing North Texas city, told by a librarian who has been practicing lean for over a decade — first under the guidance of consultants, then on her own, then alongside a team teaching lean to the whole city, then at a COVID vaccine hub run out of a closed Sears store, and eventually into the design of a brand-new 158,000-square-foot library building.
Elizabeth Chase walks through the journey in this session. The story is useful precisely because it doesn't follow the standard arc. There's no executive mandate at the start. No consulting firm running the program end-to-end. No big bang. What there is, instead, is a librarian and her colleagues reading books, applying what they read, making mistakes, learning from those mistakes, and slowly building lean into the operational DNA of a city government. The result is one of the most relatable lean case studies you'll come across — and one of the most useful for anyone trying to start lean somewhere it hasn't been done before.
Elizabeth's framing of the origin: when you're a librarian, of course it starts with books.
Four books shaped the early thinking. Eliyahu Goldratt's The Goal introduced the theory of constraints — the idea that no process is faster than its slowest step. The framing resonated immediately for a local government team that lives with constraints daily. John Huber's Lean Library Management translated lean concepts directly into librarianship, which removed the translation overhead most service organizations face when they encounter lean for the first time. Paul Akers' 2 Second Lean showed that everyone in an organization could participate in improvement, not just the people who could be pulled into a kaizen event. And Mark Graban's Practicing Lean emphasized that lean is a practice, something you keep doing, not a credential you earn and put down.
Those four ideas — constraint thinking, library-specific application, everyone participating, ongoing practice — became the foundation. They synthesized into a distinct approach: small improvements made regularly by everyone, sustained over time, applied to the actual work people were already doing.
Early in the journey, the library team worked directly with John Huber. Several specific lean tools came out of that engagement and have stayed in use since.
Balloon diagrams to capture what guests want from a service and what staff want from the process. Video recording of work to catch details that get missed in real-time observation. The first-touch principle, which says that if you can complete a task on the first time you handle an item, do it then — which drives toward one-piece flow and shorter cycle times. Peak load management, recognizing that levelling workload is easier than absorbing peaks and valleys, and that some peaks (every day school is out, in a public library) are uncontrollable while others are self-inflicted. The 80/20 principle reframed for library work: staff manages the 20% exceptions while the 80% business-as-usual runs so smoothly it takes care of itself. Flowcharts and flow diagrams to surface variation, transportation waste, and motion waste.
The most operationally important lesson from the consulting engagement was about batch sizes.
The library has a structural constraint: on an items-per-capita basis, its collection is too small for the population it serves. The collection has to turn fast — books need to be checked out, returned, reshelved, and back on the shelf for the next member quickly. Reshelving speed is one of the few variables the library can control directly.
Elizabeth makes a sharp comparison between retail and library operations. In retail, the ideal cycle is once-and-done: acquire the product, stock it, sell it, never see it again. In a library, the ideal cycle is the opposite: a book gets checked out and returned and reshelved up to 200 times before it physically wears out. Small process improvements in retail get applied once per item. Small process improvements in a library compound across hundreds of cycles per item. The math on improvement is fundamentally different.
The specific lean principle that applies: reduce batch sizes to shorten lead times. For the library, that means reshelving carts that hold one or two shelves of books rather than fully loaded carts that take longer to process and slow down the cycle.
Elizabeth is honest that this didn't land instantly. The pattern over the early years was that batch sizes would shrink, then grow again during peak times, then shrink, then grow. Stress reverts people to old habits even when they intellectually know the new way works better. Ten years in, the library is consistently shelving in batch sizes of one or two shelves per small cart — but the path there wasn't smooth.
The mechanism that made it stick was a visible scoreboard tracking whether the daily reshelving goal was being met. In the old building, that was a whiteboard with dry-erase markers. In the new building, it's screens mounted in the circulation work room with electronically updated data. The visibility itself drives the behavior. The 4 Disciplines of Execution — wildly important goals, lead vs. lag measures, scoreboards — informed the approach.
The honest part of the story most case studies skip. After the consulting engagement ended, Elizabeth tried to keep lean alive across the staff by sending weekly emails sharing lean theory and tools. Her own assessment: probably the least effective thing they ever did. One-way communication, all theory, assuming the emails were even read.
What was actually needed was practice. So the management team agreed to a different approach: each of the library's four divisions — circulation, adult services, youth services, and the third floor of "misfit employees" — would complete and document one 2-second-lean-style improvement per month. Each division had a specific week when its improvement was due. Across the library, that produced one improvement a week, every week, visible to everyone.
A YouTube channel was created to post the improvement videos. Staff who didn't have computer speakers or didn't want to be on camera learned to save PowerPoints as videos. The channel is still up — Elizabeth invites the audience to find it — though new content stopped years ago.
One example: customized sticky notes printed for two purposes. One set goes inside DVD and audiobook cases so members can flag a defective disc by moving the sticky note to the outside before returning it. The library has a disc resurfacing machine that handles cleaning. Members can write their library card number on the sticky note to have the disc returned to them after repair. The other set of sticky notes is for internal communication — a controlled vocabulary for why an item has been routed back to the materials services team. Both eliminate redundant problem identification and reduce communication overhead.
In 2017, Frisco's newly elected mayor Jeff Cheney asked each department director to report on what was happening in their department. Library director Shelley Holley included lean. The mayor — who has a Six Sigma background — paid attention and announced that the library would extend lean training to all city departments.
The Frisco Lean Team formed under Deputy City Manager Henry Hill. The team developed a 4-hour lean fundamentals class that Elizabeth teaches, focused on three things: broadly applicable core lean concepts, a shared vocabulary across city employees, and empowering employees to improve their own work.
The certification structure follows the Peak Academy model from Denver. To earn bronze certification, an employee must take the class and complete an improvement project within a month. Improvements are shared at monthly Lean Club meetings open to all city employees. The structure produced strong adoption: between launch and COVID, almost half of all city employees attended a bronze class, and almost 90% of those completed a project and earned certification.
The bronze level is foundational — applied to one's own work. Silver is for groups working to improve a process they all participate in. The silver level has been harder to get traction on; only one group, in engineering, has earned silver certification.
A specific example of bronze-level work: the library's circulation team uses first-in-first-out cards on book carts to make sure items get reshelved in return order. A staff member named Monita got tired of walking to a desk to fetch a dry-erase marker every time she filled out a card. Her improvement: velcro a dry-erase marker to each cart. Total cost: minimal. Total impact: eliminated wasted motion across hundreds of repetitions.
Elizabeth notes that no one in the city has lean as their full-time job. Everyone teaches, leads, and practices lean as part of "other duties as assigned." That structure has trade-offs. It helps lean grow organically among genuinely interested people, but it makes it hard to find the time and resources for the program to mature in some directions.
In early 2021, when the COVID vaccine rollout began, Frisco city leadership decided the city should set up and run a vaccine center. The fire department took the lead. In one month, they went from idea to fully operational vaccine hub in an empty Sears store at the mall.
Elizabeth participated in process design — visiting an existing vaccine site at a hospital, analyzing what worked, looking for improvements.
The day before opening, Toyota's TSSC (Toyota Production System Support Center) — the nonprofit arm of Toyota that teaches TPS to government and nonprofit organizations — offered to help. Elizabeth is candid: the fire department wasn't thrilled at last-minute help. They became receptive once TSSC demonstrated they could gather and display data in ways that let the fire department make data-based decisions to improve operations.
The combination produced striking results. The vaccine hub achieved an 18-minute door-to-door time, including the mandatory 15-minute observation period. Vaccine waste at end of day: zero.
Elizabeth's takeaway from working alongside Toyota: applying basic Toyota Production System techniques was enough to radically exceed the goals. You don't have to be an expert. You have to put the basics into practice.
The workforce composition adds to the story. The vaccine hub ran with a constantly shifting mix of staff — city employees told to report, hired temps, Frisco Independent School District employees, and National Guard units, depending on the week. Each group had different strengths and weaknesses. Elizabeth notes that during the first week, the morning training kept getting interrupted because frontline staff had so many improvement ideas they wanted to share and implement immediately.
One specific example: a Frisco ISD teacher made and brought in a paper sign showing the barcode patients needed to have ready to scan at the vaccine station. The team built on the idea — added a driver's license image since photo ID was also needed, laminated the signs, distributed them along the line. The improvement reduced the need to project verbally through masks, helped non-English speakers, and visually reinforced verbal instructions.
The unifying observation Elizabeth draws: when you have a good process, relationships are easier and better. The mission doesn't have to be saving lives. Every organization has a mission. When the mission comes first and everyone focuses on improving processes to achieve it, the work gets easier and the relationships hold.
The vaccine hub closed in April 2021 as vaccines became widely available. The next week, the Frisco Public Library broke ground on its new building, which opened March 4, 2023, at 158,000 square feet — more than three times the old building.
Because lean had been the operating system for nearly a decade by that point, the new building was designed with lean built in from the start. Several specific decisions illustrate the approach.
Flexibility through movable infrastructure. Service points and shelving on wheels. If the initial placement doesn't match how guests actually use the space, the team can reposition. As collection needs shift, shelves move with them. Power available throughout the floor, including raised floors that allow power to be run anywhere — necessary because even the shelving is lit. (The shelf lighting puts light exactly where it's needed for guests to read spine labels under high ceilings.)
Process thinking applied to layout. Constraints on the location of the external book return drove the location of the circulation department. From there, the most popular collections — the ones that get reshelved most often — went as close to circulation as possible to minimize transportation waste.
Designing for the guest doing the work. Knowing that the new building would open with no additional staff but more than three times the space, the team needed guests to find what they wanted with minimal staff intervention. The 18 months before the move went into reclassifying the entire collection — eliminating Dewey Decimal in favor of a word-based neighborhood system based on BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications) categories. Borrowing from the AnyThink Libraries in Colorado and the Maricopa County Library System in Arizona, the system means guests don't have to convert "business" to "658.4" — they read a sign that says "business" and scan shelf flags for subdivisions like "management."
The reclassification also simplified shelving for staff and volunteers. Three rules: everything is alphabetical, blank lines come before lines with text, numerals come before letters. Spaces and punctuation in the call numbers were eliminated to remove sorting ambiguity.
Glass walls on reservable rooms. The new building has 15 study rooms, four conference rooms, one unconference room, and one production studio — ten times the reservable spaces of the old building. Glass walls let staff monitor activity and intervene when service policy is being violated. (Elizabeth notes the first rule the director had to enforce: no open flames in the library. Someone had been lighting birthday candles on cupcakes.)
Sight lines and clearing the building. 48-inch shelving for picture books, 60-inch elsewhere — keeping shelves low improves staff visibility. The mezzanine has clear sight lines across the entire first floor. At closing, public services and circulation staff work together to clear the building from back wall to front doors, creating a human chain that prevents backtracking. Total clearing time: 3 to 10 minutes.
Automated materials handling. A 31-bin sorter reads RFID tags on books and routes them to bins based on home location. Circulation managers program the bin sorts to balance volume across bins and group adjacent home locations together. The presort dramatically reduces the time needed to fine-sort carts and limits transportation waste during shelving.
Hands-free doors for staff. Doors between public and staff areas open via proximity sensor when set to one-way. Staff walk toward the door carrying carts and the door opens. Based on a small time study, the technology saves the equivalent of a half-time employee per year. The side-to-side slide is also a safety feature — no swinging doors hitting people.
A drive-through that actually works. The old drive-through was, in Elizabeth's words, possibly the worst-designed drive-through in the history of drive-throughs. One lane with two stops so close together that a car at one blocked access to the other. The utility bill drop-off was located under the service window. Both the service window and the book return required getting out of the car. Inside, staff had to crank a pass-through open and closed and stand on a stool to use it. The new building has separate lanes for holds pickup and book returns, both covered, with hands-free fast-food-style windows at the right height for both staff and drivers.
Eliminated paper marketing. The new building uses large digital screens mounted throughout the space instead of flyers, handouts, or posters. Software determines what slides show on what screens at what times — Story Time warnings during Story Time, maker space promotion near the maker space.
Walkie-talkies for cross-building communication. The director identified Star Trek-style communicator pins that would have been cool. The budget said no. The team tested walkie-talkies the circulation team was already using, found they worked across the new building's footprint, and standardized on them. Four channels: circulation, public services, closing (used by both), and facilities.
One office supply closet. In the old building, each division was on a different floor with its own office supply collection. In the new building, all staff work areas are adjacent and share one office supply closet. The consolidation revealed how much excess inventory had accumulated because divisions didn't know what other divisions had on hand. Circulation, which leads the library in kanban card use, organized the closet and runs the reorder system. Spending on new supplies is down.
A few patterns Elizabeth points to as load-bearing for sustainment.
Constraints helped. Frisco was for a long time the fastest-growing city in the U.S. by census data. Elizabeth's working theory — surfaced during a visit from Dean Schroeder and Alan Robinson — is that the constant growth filtered the workforce. Employees who weren't interested in working hard and finding ways to improve didn't last. The people who stayed already had the disposition. Lean gave them vocabulary, tools, and permission to do what they wanted to do anyway.
No reward systems for improvements. Elizabeth read early on that Toyota had tried various reward programs and found they weren't the best approach. Frisco took the same view. Her standard line: lean is its own reward. After bronze certification, employees have a month to do their improvement. She sends one email reminder two weeks before it's due. No nagging. The intrinsic motivation is the engine.
Stress causes regression. This is the honest observation that runs through the story. When things get hard — peak season, COVID, staff turnover — people revert to what's comfortable, even when they know intellectually it's not the most efficient approach. Sustaining lean isn't about people not regressing. It's about building the system that catches the regression and gradually pulls behavior back to the standard.
The mission orients everything. Elizabeth keeps returning to this. Frisco Public Library's mission is to enrich lives by inspiring intellect, curiosity, and imagination. When the mission stays first and everyone focuses on improving processes to achieve it, the work gets easier. The mission doesn't have to be saving lives. Every organization has one. The question is whether it's actually orienting the work or just sitting on a wall.
Investment, not buy-in. A reframe Elizabeth picked up — possibly from Brian Elms — that changed her language. You buy into a poker game in the hopes of cashing out quickly. You invest in something for the long term. Lean is an investment. The framing changes how the conversation goes with skeptical stakeholders.
A few specific things the platform does that connect to what Elizabeth describes.
KaiNexus makes the kind of distributed, everyone-participates improvement Elizabeth's library practiced — one improvement per division per week, visible across the organization — sustainable at scale. The YouTube channel approach worked for a while, but it required significant overhead to maintain. The platform handles the capture, routing, visibility, and impact tracking automatically.
The cross-departmental structure of the Frisco Lean Team — bronze-certified employees across the entire city, sharing improvements at monthly meetings — is exactly what KaiNexus is built to support across multi-site or multi-department organizations. The shared vocabulary, the visibility into who's contributing, the connection of small improvements to operational outcomes.
The platform also closes the futility loop that kills participation. People keep submitting ideas when ideas reliably lead to action. Frisco built that culture through leadership and habit. The platform is the infrastructure that supports that culture at organizational scale.
If your organization is trying to spread lean beyond a single team or facility — into other departments, other sites, or across an entire city or system — the gap is usually the infrastructure that makes participation worthwhile. That's the gap KaiNexus is built to close.
Elizabeth Chase is Materials Services Manager at the Frisco Public Library in Frisco, Texas. She began her career with the City of Frisco in 2003 and has served at the library as Adult Services Reference Librarian, Cataloger, and Senior Librarian. Elizabeth is a member of the Frisco Lean Team Steering Committee, which develops and implements lean certification for city employees, and she teaches the four-hour lean fundamentals class to employees throughout the city. Her work focuses on improving flow, engaging staff, and designing systems that support continuous improvement in public service environments.
Can lean work outside of manufacturing and healthcare?
Yes. The Frisco Public Library and the City of Frisco have practiced lean for over a decade across library operations, fire department operations, parks and recreation, engineering, and other city services. The principles — value, flow, pull, respect for people, continuous improvement — translate to any work where processes can be defined and improved. What changes between industries is the specific application, not the underlying approach.
How did lean spread from one library to a whole city?
Through three things, in order. First, the library practiced lean visibly enough that the new mayor noticed during department reports. Second, the Frisco Lean Team formed under deputy city management to extend training to all departments. Third, a 4-hour bronze certification class was developed with a hands-on improvement project requirement — broadly applicable concepts, shared vocabulary, employees empowered to improve their own work. Almost half of city employees took the class before COVID, and almost 90% of those completed certification.
What does lean look like in a public library specifically?
Reshelving in small batch sizes (one or two shelves per cart) to keep collection turnover fast. Visible scoreboards tracking daily reshelving goals. First-in-first-out cards on book carts. Eliminating Dewey Decimal in favor of a word-based BISAC system that guests can read directly. Glass walls on reservable rooms for staff sight lines. Hands-free doors between staff and public areas. RFID-based automated materials handling. Walkie-talkies for cross-building communication. The library applies lean across operations, layout, technology, and staff workflow.
What was the role of consultants in the Frisco lean journey?
John Huber from Lean Library Management was the first consultant. He taught the team specific tools — balloon diagrams, video analysis, first-touch principle, peak load management, the 8 wastes — and worked through reshelving as the first major process. After the consulting engagement ended, the library had to figure out how to continue without an expert. Toyota's TSSC also worked with the library twice — once during the COVID vaccine hub setup, and later on improving the maker space equipment maintenance process. The team's framing: a good consultant teaches you what you need to know, and the work is in following through after they're gone.
How did Frisco apply lean to the COVID vaccine hub?
The fire department went from idea to operational vaccine hub in one month, set up in a closed Sears store at the mall. Toyota's TSSC arrived the day before opening and helped the team gather and display data for decision-making. Many of the city staff working the hub already had bronze-level lean training. The combination produced an 18-minute door-to-door time (including the 15-minute observation period) and zero vaccine waste at end of day. Elizabeth's takeaway: applying basic TPS techniques was enough to radically exceed goals — expertise wasn't required, just consistent application of the basics.
How was lean built into the design of the new library building?
Through deliberate decisions made over several years before the building opened. Movable shelving and service points for flexibility. Power available throughout the floor for adaptable layouts. Process-driven location of the most-reshelved collections close to circulation. Glass walls on reservable rooms for staff sight lines. Hands-free doors between staff and public areas. Automated materials handling with a 31-bin sorter. Eliminated paper marketing in favor of digital screens. One consolidated office supply closet running on kanban. The lean thinking informed the architecture, not the other way around.
What's the biggest lesson from a decade of practicing lean in public service?
Elizabeth's framing: consistently applying the basics of lean or TPS will get you further than expert-level learning that's inconsistently or never applied. Don't settle for theory. Put theory into practice and learn from that. The Frisco story is not a story of reaching expert mastery. It's a story of small improvements made consistently over a long enough time that they compounded into operational transformation.
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