WHAT IS LEAN
The core idea of Lean is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Simply, lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources, notes Lean Enterprise Institute.
Lean is a set of standard practices, based on experiments, developed for an organisation. It might be started somewhere in the process of value creating. Value stream is a place to learn what works best for a certain organisation. Starting with a value stream is the best way to create the hypothesis about how to make things better and determine the current state.
When identifying the business problem or the opportunity, the organisation measures the performance gap and inventory the potential countermeasures. Then the most promising countermeasure is to be selected, and Plan-Do-Check-Act conducted. That’s management by science.
Organisations want to start with the CEO and believe that if only the CEO would do this and that, everything would be great. Many want to start with education and Lean Thinking, and / or benchmarking. Education and benchmarking produce no benefit without action, which is to say, without experiments.
The Lean enterprise institute recommends starting where the organisation is. Whether there are the CEO, COO, CFO, CIO, a business unit head, a department head, facility manager, area leader within a facility, product line manager, they should start where they are. The heads of the operational excellence and continuous improvement programs does not include in this process. Lean transformation must be led by line managers. And the job of continuous improvement is to coach line managers on how to run experiments and to provide technical assistance as necessary.
The best idea is to start experiments that can provide more value for customers by eliminating waste and creating success. That’s important to pick a value creating process and not to spread all over the place.When value stream is picked, time to create an A3, problem solving template, and run experiments. Reflections on what has been learned is crucial as well as sharing findings with the rest of organisation.
It is called Yokoten: horizontal or vertical spread of good ideas. Keeping on experimenting is the key. Lean is not a program, it is not time limited, it has no end.
