A lean-thinking industrial engineer took home a prestigious award for business excellence at a ceremony in Dublin yesterday.

Ms Elaine Carroll was presented with the Irish Centre for Business Excellence's National Business Excellence Award for her contributions to improving organisational performance at IBM, where she is an industrial engineer.

The award recognises contributions by an individual and their organisation to the development of world-class business management concepts in Ireland.

Ms Carroll is part of a continuous improvement group at IBM that seeks to improve process efficiency. The group practises "Lean Thinking", an idea developed in the 1990s that focuses on using a company's intellectual and physical resources in the most efficient way possible.

The idea behind Lean Thinking is to get firms to consider how various steps in a process add up to create the value of the final product. By re-orienting their efforts around the steps that add the most value, the theory says, firms can eliminate waste and increase efficiency.

Business authors James P Womack and Daniel T Jones first advanced the idea of Lean Thinking in The Machine that Changed The World: The Story of Lean Production, their 1991 best-selling book on Toyota.