Lean can be viewed as a management philosophy, a mindset, a methodology, a tool set, or an approach to daily work. At it’s core, it’s all about minimising wastes and maximizing value to customers. Value is what customers need and expect and are willing to pay for.
This includes receiving the right products and services at a specified price, time, and place. For example, if you see an extra charge in your invoice because warehouse personnel spent five hours to look at your item, would you want to pay for that? Of course not! It is of no value to you.
Lean Workflow. Lean is a systematic way to identify Value and eliminate Waste within a Process to improve the flow or velocity of the outputs.
- The Lean methodology relies on 3 very simple ideas:
- deliver value from your customer’s perspective
- eliminate waste (things that don’t bring value to the end product)
- continuous improvement
In order to Identify Waste in a Process, it is important to first understand that “Value” must be defined from the Customer’s standpoint. We work with clients to maximise the Value in their processes and eliminate Waste by guiding Client Teams through the following steps:
• Review and Document Existing Process Workflows
• Create Value Stream Maps or Functional Flow Charts
• Identify Non-Value-Added Process Steps and Activities
• Lead Improvement Workshops
Principle |
Description |
Identify Value |
What does every company strive to do? To offer a product/service that a customer is ready to pay for. To do so, a company needs to add value defined by its customers’ needs. |
Value Stream mapping |
This is the point where you literally need to map the workflow of your company. It has to include all actions and people involved in the process of delivering the end product to the customer. By doing so, you will be able to identify what parts of the process bring no value. |
Create continuous workflow |
After you mastered your value stream you need to make sure that the workflow of each team remains smooth. Have in mind that it may take a while. |
Create a Pull System |
Having a stable workflow is a guarantee that your teams can deliver work tasks much faster with less effort. However, in order to secure the stable workflow, make sure to create a pull system. |
Continuous Improvement |
After going through all previous steps, you already built your Lean management system. However, don’t forget to pay attention to this last step, probably the most important one |
Benefits of Lean thinking
Focus, better resource utilisation, Improving productivity & efficiency, Smarter process (pull system). As a result, your company (team) will be much more flexible and able to respond to consumer’s requirements much faster. In the end, Lean management principles will let you create a stable production system with a higher chance of improving overall performance.
Wastage
When Japanese companies talk about waste they usually talk about the three Ms; Mura, Muri and Muda.
- Muda – 7 wastes TIMWOODS
- Mura – is the waste of unevenness or inconsistency
- Muri is to cause overburden
Waste is anything that is of no value or adds no value for customers. Waste comes in many forms. Eight types of waste have been identified. I know a guy named Tim Woods who can help us remember it all. TIMWOODS is an acronym:
- T for transport, that’s movement of people, materials, products, or documents between activities or locations.
- I for inventory. Just in case additional inventory whether it is raw materials, work in process, or finished goods inventory.
- M for motion, movement within an activity that does not add value for the customer.
- W for waiting, time wasted between activities, waiting for required resources, materials, parts, people, or information.
- O for overproduction, producing more than what’s needed. For example, making 20 copies when only two were needed.
- O for overprocessing, inappropriate, excessive processing and unnecessary duplication of work that adds no value. For example, polishing your presentation slides repeatedly after multiple rehearsals before presenting to senior management.
- D for defects, defective work, defective items, or any undesired outcome that adds no value.
- S for skills underutilized. This refers to underutilization of employee skills and intellect such as when a highly qualified scientist or engineer is assigned to administrative work.
Lean targets the elimination of waste to improve efficiency, flow, and speed.
Waste | Production | Software Dev | Marketing |
Transport | Moving parts and materials from one place to another | Switching between tasks too often, countless interruptions from colleagues. | Task switching, interruptions, unnecessary long marketing funnel |
Inventory | Undelivered products or parts. Overstocking with equipment that may be in need somewhere in the future | Undelivered code. Undelivered features | Fully-prepared marketing campaigns which stay unlaunched |
Motion | Unnecessary movement of the worker | Unnecessary meetings, extra effort to find information | Unnecessary meetings, extra effort to find information, attending events without clear agenda |
Waiting | Waiting for goods to be delivered | Waiting for testing to complete, waiting for code review and so on | Waiting (often related to lack of hierarchical flexibility) – waiting for an approval from higher management |
Overproduction | Too many items produced “just in case | Producing features that nobody is going to use | Performing many different marketing activities without having a clear vision and strategy |
Over-processing | Spending a lot of time on a given task. Adding a feature that doesn’t bring value | Unnecessary complex algorithms solving simple problems | Generating countless marketing reports manually, while they can be automated |
Defects | Broken parts or defected parts that need to be reworked | Bugs | Wrong brand Communication |
Heijunka Levelling by Volume or Type
When establishing a continuous flow of work, you need to stop processing work in batches in order to produce only what was ordered and keep your inventory costs low
Jidoka
Establishing a continuous flow of work is vital for the successful implementation of Lean in any organisation. Doing so will allow you to deliver value to your customers exactly when they need it without keeping too much inventory.
- Discover an abnormality
- Stop the process
- Fix the immediate problem
- Investigate and solve the root cause
Lean targets the elimination of waste to improve efficiency, flow, and speed.
Here are some key concepts of lean:
- Value stream, a value stream is all those processes, activities, and resources, including information, used to transform inputs into outputs that are sealable to customers. The elimination of waste will improve efficiency, speed, and flow of the value stream.
- Theory of constraints, the output of a value stream is only as fast as the slowest processing step, bottleneck, or constraint. To improve the rate of output or throughput, focus on improving the constraint until it is no longer a limiting factor. That is the crux of the theory of constraints, developed by Eli Goldratt.
- Pull instead of push, customer demand pulls the order, product, or transaction throughout the value stream from suppliers to customers. Traditionally, products have been pushed to customers by suppliers or producers, regardless of whether they want it or not or if they’re ready to receive it or not. That is why you see your end clearance sales. Pull, on the other hand, is about customer demand pulling and authorizing work and delivery as and when it is needed.
- Just-in-time flow, items or transactions should be produced, processed, or delivered just-in-time, as it is needed, at the same rate as customer demand. If goods or services are produced to the drum beat or rate of customer demand, where a demand for an item signals a production and delivery of that item from the next upstream workstation then there’s no need for inventory.
When you find yourself redoing something, making unnecessary trips, waiting in line, or stuck with items you don’t need, fix the issue by applying lean concepts.