Lean Thinking – Operations and Business Management Best Practice
Lean is a management system to maximize customer value while minimizing waste, a system to drive continuous improvements and efficiencies that utilise less time, effort and resources thereby giving greater returns based on:
- Customer-focused definition of value
- Having an involved, motivated workforce committed – individually and as teams – to the most effective delivering of this value through continuous improvement by the elimination of every form of unnecessary waste
This in turn will increase performance, productivity, competitiveness and sustainability of the enterprise – helping get the best of the business and its people.
Lean focuses on Purpose, Processes and People
Purpose: What customer problems will the enterprise solve to achieve its own purpose of prospering? (Vision/Values, True North, Strategy Formulation and Deployment)
Process: How will the organization assess each major value stream to make sure each step is valuable, capable, available, adequate, flexible, and that all the steps are linked by flow, pull, and leveling? (Stability, Quality, Just in Time, Customer, Lean & Green tools)
People: How can the organization ensure that every important process has someone responsible for continually evaluating that value stream in terms of sustainable business purpose and lean process? How can everyone touching the value stream be actively engaged in operating it correctly and continually improving it? Who does the work and how do we respect, engage and develop people to continuously improve the work through problem solving (Respect for People, Teamwork, Continuous Improvement).