WWD06 What is Lean?
As a leader do you practice lean?
If you are in a manufacturing industry and produce real stuff you practice it or at least
you wish you would.
But if you operate in a service or transactional industry, do you even know what Lean is?
And it does matter if you want superior results and engaged people at work.
Hello this is Pierre Bienvenüe from impi!
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So, let’s answer the question.
What is lean?
Otherwise known as lean manufacturing and more recently, lean management?
In this video, I want to provide one definition of the term, its origin, and focus on several
principles to lean management.
To keep you interested in this short video I won’t discuss the method or tools.
There are several definitions to lean.
Here is a one sentence one: Lean is both a way of thinking and a practice
that aims at delivering exact value to the customer by continually engaging people to
improve quality, delivery and cost.
The term "Lean" was coined in 1988 by John Krafcik in his article "Triumph of the Lean
Production System", and defined in 1996 by James Womack and Daniel Jones in their book
“Lean Thinking”.
It replaced the term Just-In-Time in the 90’s.
I would like to give credit to Professor Norman Faull, founder of the lean Institute, Africa,
for enlightening us with the three principles I introduce here.
Look: what is this man doing?
Thinking?
Lean creates a thinking people, but how?
By making them solving their own problems and making decisions.
The principle here is to utilise the knowledge, experience and creativity of people that work
the process all the time to improve it.
There is more power to harness in the mind of all employees than in that of managers
or improvement specialists.
Ask people to make their processes simpler, better, faster and cheaper by experimenting
and learning.
That’s respect in action.
You can imagine that behind that sort of people engagement there is a strong and relentless
leadership commitment and a system of continuous improvement.
What is this?
A bin?
Well done, discerning viewer.
A bin is a repository for waste.
Waste are these activities that eat up time and that your customer is not willing to pay
for.
So we want to choose what to improve in order to eliminate wasteful activities from our
processes.
We're going to take a closer look at the Seven Deadly Wastes in another video.
But let me give you real life examples of wasteful activities that may sound familiar
to you as a leader.
In a previous career, I attended the Tuesday coffee meeting - a weekly senior management
meeting.
Every time the CEO was coming back from one of his business trip to the Far East we would
be treated to an epic narration.
This was entertaining, he was a good story teller.
That took a good chunk of the morning.
During that time, for lack of time, operational decisions were delayed and had to be addressed
in an ad hoc format later during the week.
This is the waste of over-processing.
Another example of over-processing.
You request one of your associate a particular study to make a business decision.
She spends several workdays on it and delivers to you the report.
But after postponing for weeks, pressed by the events you’ve already made an urgent
decision.
So You’ve paid your employee to do a job that is wasted.
She’s peed off too and you might not have made the right call.
Another classic.
You try to organise meetings with a prospective client.
They don’t come back to you, or they communicate poorly and you wait for days for a vague response.
You have to spend time searching for information, searching for the truth.
That’s the waste of motion.
You get it.
So wasteful activities don’t just happen at operational levels, but also at all levels
of management.
They add time to decision making and eat up expensive management time.
Next principle, Is there a problem in this scene?
We actually don't know.
We don't have a standard.
So we don't know what is normal or abnormal.
Is the problem with the one meerkat standing, the cat hiding or the one meerkat looking
at you, unlike the other animals.
Now, once we have a standard, the lean principle is that we want to know what is normal from
what is abnormal right now.
And we want to respond to it right now.
A lean company eliminates fluctuations in its processes.
becomes more and more agile and responsive to customer demands and external constraints.
So the principles and methods of Lean Manufacturing are relevant to any organisation that have
customers and need to satisfy them by delivering a product, service or transaction.
Not only does this apply to automotive assembly plants or packaging companies, but also to
call centres, marketing agencies, hospitals, banks, NFT exchange platforms,
governmental institutions and fishing operations.
So to wrap up, these three principles of Lean are:
– Create a thinking people – Eliminate Wasteful activities
– Establish standards and respond immediately to abnormal situations
And this is the good quote for this episode.
Jim Womack and Daniel Jones, in their book, Lean Thinking, wrote:
“Lean is a way to do more and more with less (while giving the end customers exactly
what they want).”
Isn’t this beautiful?
If you are one of the first 3 people able to identify the location of this view, you
can meet with me for a free hour of leadership coaching.
Just write the location in the comment section and send me an email at wwd@impi.solutions.
Also, you may have a need to improve on your leadership skills, turn them into good habits
or you need support to transform your organisation.
I can help you.
Feel free to connect.
I’ll be posting the next episode in two weeks.
In the meantime, lead well!