Lean Thinking is a business strategy, not a cost-cutting improvement methodology. It has been applied successfully in banking, health care, education, and manufacturing, leading to major improvements in their ability to serve customers. The strategy helps you to shorten the time between when the customer places an order and when you deliver it.
If approached as a fad, Lean Thinking fails just like any other “new” business approach. A tried and true approach, it is a steady process of focused elimination of any activity in your processes that wastes employees’ time, but does nothing to improve the quality of your customer’s order.
Too often, employees must navigate through a maze of confusion to do their job. Studies show that 10-20% of most work processes actually add value to the product or service. The rest just wastes your employees’ time. Lean Thinking helps you to cut through the maze.
A Lean organization is not created overnight. Transforming your business to Lean happens project by project, a few employees at a time. It requires a different type of leadership and a different way of thinking about efficiency. In fact, it is 180 degrees away from traditional management thinking.
But it is extremely effective. Typical improvements successful practitioners have seen include:
- Customer wait-time reduced from several weeks to several days
- Productivity increased by several hundred percent—that’s not a typo
- Setup times cut by 50-90%
- A more confident and engaged workforce
If you would like to turn your organization around in a way that sets you apart from the competition with a quicker response to your customer, we can show you how.
We have a significant list of references willing to back us on that.