Organizations that re-think their end-to-end processes and value chains and find ways to provide what their Customers value better, faster, and with significantly fewer resources than their competitors can obviously develop an unassailable competitive advantage.

The primary objective of Lean Management is very simple, continuously reducing the lead time of an organization’s service, manufacturing, and support processes. Lead time is defined as the average time it takes to complete the entire process - from start to finish - including time waiting between the different process steps or activities of the process. Yes, time is money.

Imagine how your business model and competitiveness would change, if some of your critical processes that today take 10 or 20 days from start to finish could be done in 1 to 2 days.

Lean Management helps Operational Excellence organizations to create flow, for both materials and information, and maximize value through the reduction or elimination of non-value adding activities.

Instead of a diet, Lean Management should be thought of as a long-term health program for your business. Consider it a way to add energy, speed, and vitality to your organization.

The continued success of Lean thinking, principles, and tools over the last two decades makes Lean Management, together with the Six Sigma methodology, one of the main components of every Operational Excellence and Process Excellence initiative.

In “Lean Thinking”, published in 2003, James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones introduced the five fundamental Lean Management Principles.

1. Define Value in the Eye of the Customer – Thoroughly understand what the Customer values. – Create products and processes that more than satisfy customer needs. – Develop methods for identifying & measuring customer value. – Fulfilling customer needs supersede everything except safety.

2. Working in Value Stream – Identify the end-to-end value stream for each product or service. - Organize processes around value streams. - Challenge all of the business-value adding and non-value adding (wastes) steps currently necessary to create and deliver each product or service. - Add nothing more than value.

3. Create Material, Information & Cash Flow – Eliminate obstacles to flow: over-production, inventory, over-processing, waiting, transportation, defects, and motion. - Make the product or service creation and delivery process flow through the remaining value-added steps.

4. Establish Demand-Driven Pull – Introduce pull between all process steps where continuous flow is possible. – Every step moves at the rate of customer needs: the takt time. – All flow comes at the direct pull of the customer.

5. Pursue Perfection – Deploy Lean as a long-term business strategy, not a tactical cost-reduction initiative. – Use a scientific method for problem solving and improvement. - Manage toward perfection, but don’t do everything at once. – Establish a culture of small rapid improvements and longer-term initiatives.

Operational Excellence Consulting offers customized hands-on Lean Management training workshops, Kaizen event facilitation, and deployment support covering all Lean Management concepts, methods, and tools, including Lean Thinking, Kaizen Event Management, 5S Visual Workplace Organization, Value Stream Mapping (VSM), Lean Standard or Standardized Work, Mistake-Proofing & Poka-Yoke, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Pull & Kanban Systems, Theory of Constraints (TOC), and Quick or Rapid Changeover (SMED). To read more about some of our onsite Lean Management workshops please visit Our Workshops.

An initial Operational Excellence 360^o Assessment ^TM will provide you with an unbiased in-depth understanding of your organization's current capabilities and opportunities, and thus provide a solid foundation for the development of a Lean Management or Lean Six Sigma deployment plan.

Visit our OpEx Academy for Training Materials, eLearning Modules, Webinars, Online Courses, and Public Workshops.

Contact Us to discuss how Operational Excellence Consulting can support you and your organization in establishing or accelerating your own Operational Excellence, Lean Management, and Six Sigma initiative. Follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook.