The Superfactory 20 - Lean Companies To Watch

You'll recall that late last year we had a poll of "best lean public company."  After several hundred votes the list grew to 54 companies across pretty much every industry.  No definition of "best" was purposely given.  The top 20 companies have been turned into a group called the "Superfactory 20" and their individual and average performance will be tracked against the S&P500 in 2008.

Thanks to some rather clever programming by a friend of mine in Portugal ("spanning the globe to bring you the best..."), there is now a web page on Superfactory that shows the performance of those 20 companies, plus the average ("Superfactory 20 Average") and the S&P 500, sorted from highest to lowest and updated every hour.  There is even a little summary widget that can be added to websites and blogs.

Obviously the impact of lean manufacturing is just one of many factors that can affect a company's stock performance, however companies enlightened enough to implement real lean probably have effective leadership in other areas as well.  Looking back on 2007, the Superfactory 20 Average outperformed the S&P 500 by 22.66% versus 3.65%.  And the average performance of the top 20 companies in the poll was nearly double the performance of the bottom 20, which was still significantly higher than the overall market.  Any mutual fund managers interested in an interesting investment strategy?

The following is the same table as on the website, but showing the 2007 performance of the Superfactory 20.  For the 2008 data, automatically updated hourly, click here.  Obviously performance will be very volatile for the first couple months of 2008 until enough time passes to smooth out short-term fluctuations.

Disclaimer:  Past performance is no guarantee of future results.  I do own stock in five of the companies on this list (unfortunately only one of them was in the top 5!).