Lean Process Management Overview

From Toyota to Southwest Airlines, Dell to General Electric, Lean Management has helped businesses in all industries streamline their processes, cut costs and enhance value creation. Lean projects, typically called “Kaizen Events,” can yield dramatic improvements, such as:

• A hospital emergency room reduces patient wait time from check-in to initiation of care by 70%.

• An aircraft component manufacturer improves safety and reduces process cycle time by 50%.

• A health insurer reduces claim processing time from eight days to three hours.

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What is Lean?

Lean is a business excellence methodology that strives to make business processes faster and more efficient. Lean practitioners are adept at identifying and eliminating “non-value-added” process steps – wasteful activities that don’t add value to the end product or service, and which customers, if given the choice, would not pay for.

Eliminating such waste from a process not only speeds it up, it reduces wait time and makes the process cycle time more predictable. This, in turn, smooths the flow of production and enables the business to meet customer demand without exceeding it. Although Lean has its roots in the manufacturing world, it has also been applied with great success in industries from healthcare to tourism, financial services to government.

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Benefits of Lean

• Eliminates non-value-added activities and makes processes highly efficient.
• Decreases cycle time and lead time for both products and services.
• Matches production to demand by calculating Takt Time.
• Reduces excess inventory and improves cash flow.
• Improves customer satisfaction by reducing wait time and eliminating rework.
• Minimizes equipment downtime by using Rapid Changeover methods.
• Makes processes “mistake proof” by employing Standard Work practices.
• Improves employee productivity by enabling them to do their jobs more efficiently.

History of Lean

Lean can be traced back to automaker Henry Ford, whose factory assembly line began the era of mass production. Although Ford could build many cars quickly, he could only assemble the same model of car over and over again. Years later, two Toyota employees, Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo, introduced several improvements to the assembly line concept, including the ability to quickly “changeover” sections of the line so that different models could be built on the same line. Their improvements became the basis for the Toyota Production System (TPS).

In 1990, James Womack and Daniel Jones popularized Lean with their book, The Machine That Changed the World. The authors proposed five principles of Lean thinking that practitioners still uphold today:

• Value – defined from the customer’s point of view.
• Value Stream – understanding which process steps are value-added and which are not.
• Flow – keep production moving.
• Pull – produce at a rate defined by customer demand.
• Strive for Perfection – don’t stop trying to improve.

Today, many organizations combine Lean principles and tools with Six Sigma in the form of Lean Six Sigma.

To learn how Lean Management can improve your organization’s processes, products and services and contribute to operational innovation, email us or call +971 4 319 7645.

Additional Reading

Going Lean: How the Best Companies Apply Lean Manufacturing Principles to Shatter Uncertainty, Drive Innovation, and Maximize Profits - Stephen A. Ruffa

Lean Thinking : Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated - James Womack and Daniel Jones

The Toyota Way - Jeffrey Liker