OSLO, NORWAY – October 28, 2026 – Most manufacturing problems get solved more than once. A line stops, someone fixes it, production resumes, and a few weeks later the same problem is back in a slightly different form. Sissel Pedersen Lundeby, a chemical engineer, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and founder of Lean Tech AS in Oslo, Norway, has spent more than 20 years watching that pattern play out on repeat. Her new book, Never Fight the Same Fire Twice: Four Steps to Durable Problem Solving for Modern Manufacturing Teams, is a root cause analysis book written for the people inside it: the plant manager who gets the first call when something breaks, the quality engineer drowning in deviation reports, and the improvement lead whose last project held for a few months and then quietly came undone.
The book’s answer is the F.A.S.T. Method: Focus, Analyze, Solve, Track. Four steps, run in order. Focus gets the whole team to agree on one problem, stated as a measurable deviation, with a baseline from real data and a specific goal. Analyze proves the root cause with data rather than opinion. Solve generates options before judging them, scores them against clear criteria, and picks the one aimed at the proven root cause. Track gives one named owner the means to hold the result. Lundeby argues that most teams skip Focus because the problem feels obvious, and that the real issue is usually the process, not the people. The book is short and visual, meant to be read in one or two sittings, with action steps and checkpoints for each step.
Lundeby has spent more than 20 years on factory floors in pharma, defense, food production, medical devices and emissions-regulated industries. In the book, she describes helping a manufacturer unlock a 33% capacity increase to deliver a $160 million contract, the biggest in its history, in nine months with the same machines and headcount. She also built an energy model with a chemical plant that cut its steam consumption by 22,300 tons a year, about $1.34 million annually at current energy prices. The plant’s own people still run that model 12 years later.
“Every plant I walk into is full of capable, hard-working people. What they’re missing is a simple, shared way to agree on the real problem before anyone starts solving it,” said Lundeby. “That’s what this book gives them. The destination is a team that solves its own problems.”
Lars Erik Hilsen, Group CEO of Hapro, said: “If you find yourself surrounded by ‘firefighters’ and they are the ones celebrated as the heroes of the organization, this book will challenge your thinking and provide a clear direction towards a significantly better working environment, both for you as a leader and for everyone working in the factory.”
The book is available now on Amazon in Kindle and paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HLTVYYPQ
About the Author:
Sissel Pedersen Lundeby is a chemical engineer, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and the founder of Lean Tech AS in Oslo, Norway, which helps production and plant managers with process improvement, root cause analysis, emissions control and sustainable scaling. For more than 20 years she has helped manufacturing teams solve problems across pharma, defense, food production, medical devices and emissions-regulated industries. Outside work she competes in multi-day adventure races, and she can be found on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sissellundeby/.
For more information, interviews, or media inquiries, visit https://www.leantech.no/en.
Media Contact
Company Name: Lean Tech AS
Contact Person: Sissel Pedersen Lundeby
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Country: Norway
Website: https://www.leantech.no/en