What is Lean?
Lean Thinking, or simply referred to as Lean, is the westernised incarnation of the Toyota Production System. In essence, the goal of Lean is to maximise value while minimising “waste”. In other words, creating more value for the customer with fewer resources.
“Waste” is central to the Lean methodology. There are three types of wasteful practices - Muda, Muri, and Mura (yes, these Three M’s are Japanese terms borrowed from Toyota Production Systems):
Muda (wastefulness) refers to activities that consume resources without increasing the end value delivered to the customer.
Muri (overburden) refers to practices that involve overusing equipment or overworking employees beyond reasonable or practical limits. These increase costs and decrease efficiency and productivity in the long run.
Mura (un-evenness) describes operational “unevenness,” which can be thought of as the irregular performance of work that increases costs and possibly decreases efficiency over time.
Lean was born on the factory floor, so many people think of it as an improvement methodology for industrial processes only. Not true. Lean applies to every business and every process, whether in production or services. It is not simply a cost reduction program, but a way of thinking and acting for an entire organisation.
The implementation of Lean implies a complete organisation-wide transformation to one that eschews waste and relentlessly pursues the solution to every problem by empowering the workforce to own the problem and solution.
Improvement opportunities that are particularly suitable for the Lean methodology:
End-to-end processes that have multiple internal and external touchpoints
Processes mired in complexity and unnecessary steps
High-cost, repetitive processes that consume more resources than required