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The main thrust of Professor Jones’s work has been to develop and help to implement the Lean Business System. Based on Lean Thinking principles learned from Toyota, this starts by defining customer value, which then leads to the reorganisation of every step required to design, order, build, deliver, and maintain this value across all the organisations involved. As a result, firms can do more with less, respond more quickly to customer needs, create more rewarding jobs for employees and reduce their impact on the environment. The results of Lean Thinking can now be seen in every sector and across the globe.

Professor Jones and Dr. James P. Womack began collaborating on the research that led to Lean Thinking as directors of two major global research programmes led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the U.S. They co-authored the resulting books, The Future of the Automobile (1984) and The Machine that Changed the World, (1990). The latter was chosen as the Best Business Book of 1990 by the Financial Times and has sold 400,000 copies in 11 languages.

Further research with Dr. Womack led to two articles in the Harvard Business Review (1994 and 1996) and the book Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Value in your Corporation in 1996. Now in its second, expanded edition, it has sold over 300,000 copies in 10 languages. It led to Lean Summits being held in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France, Brazil, South Africa, India, Turkey, and Poland. Professor Jones and Dr. Womack have established a global network of nonprofit institutes dedicated to researching, educating, and publishing action-oriented knowledge on the Lean Business System, starting with the Lean Enterprise Institute in the U.S. and the Lean Enterprise Academy in the U.K. In 2001 they co-authored a workbook on rethinking supply chains called Seeing the Whole .

After a research career at the National Institute for Economic and Social Research in London and the Sussex European Research Centre and Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex University, Jones was appointed Professor of Manufacturing Management at Cardiff University Business School in 1989, where he was the founding Director of the Lean Enterprise Research Centre (LERC) from 1994 to 2001. He was also a founding director of the International Car Distribution Programme.

As part-time Principal of “Unipart U” he helped establish the first company university in the U.K. at the Unipart Group of Companies (1993-2001). He has contributed to several U.K. policy reviews, as a member of the ESRC Research Programmes Board (1994-7), the Rethinking Construction Task Force (1998), the Foresight Manufacturing 2020 Panel (2000), and the DTI Automotive Innovation and Growth Team (2002) . He is also a member of the grocery industry’s Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) European Academic Advisory Panel and Editor of the ECR Journal, International Commerce Review. He also lectures and advises companies implementing lean thinking across the world.