What are 5 Lean Principles Features And Benefits For Business?

The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize.

Shigeo Shingo

Lean Concept

Lean Concept is an organized approach that identifies & eliminates all types of waste that don’t add any value to the process. The primary concept of Lean principles is to boost customer value while reducing waste. A huge benefit of lean is that you will deliver the perfect value to your customers but with less work, through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste.

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An organization with lean transformation understands customer value as well as concentrates its key processes to consistently increase it. So, Lean is about working efficiently, not swiftly.

Lean is the concept of efficient manufacturing/operations that pop out of the Toyota Production System in the center of the 20th century. But Lean techniques applies not only in production or manufacturing operations, but also in the service industry as well. Regardless of if you are manufacturing a product or supplying a service, some additives “waste”.

Do you frequently wait for product shipments? So, That’s a waste. Do products left in a room until they are required? That’s a waste. The purpose of lean management is to synchronize all of your business processes so there is no waste & your operation runs as smoothly as possible.

Lean consists of a broad range of principles & tools to identify & remove waste to increase process velocity. Hence, Any activity or procedure that engrosses resources increases cost or time without generating value turns into the target for elimination.

A Lean Organization, Subjectively, should have Certain Features

• Value the customer experience above everything else.
• See every problem as well as mistake as an opportunity to smooth processes.
• Fosters a culture of problem-solving & open communication between teams at every level, thus employees feel valued & invested.

Lean Helps in:

• Improving service delivery time.
• Decreasing process cycle time.
• Decreasing or removing the chance of defect generation.
• Optimizing resources for key improvements among others.

Lean principles specialize in the “large picture” or upgrades within the complete business process. It aims to maximize human potential by empowering workers to consistently enhance their work. Lean leaders help workers grow professionally & personally.

Removing waste alongside whole value streams, rather than at isolated points, creates strategies that want much less human effort, much less capital, much less space & less time to make products and services at far fewer costs and with much fewer defects, compared with traditional business systems.

Companies are capable of reply to changing customer wish with excessive variety, excessive quality, low cost, and very rapid throughput times. Also, information management becomes much simpler & more precise.

Leader’s Tip
By promoting employee involvement, offering training, and empowering teams to find and remove waste, you can cultivate a culture of continuous improvement.

Also See: What is Lean in Non-Manufacturing?

You can develop a Lean Enterprise with the aid of aligning these 3 areas: People, Purpose & Process.

1. People: 

The achievement of any lean transformation relies upon the involvement of each employee in the process for consistent business improvement. Further, their readiness and capability to solve progressively complicated problems.

2. Purpose:

Learn how all functions, individuals as well as systems work unitedly to deliver true value to customers creating competitive advantage & enduring business results.

3. Process: 

To get real feasible results in safety, delivery, quality, cost & morale, one must bring all the lean tools to work cooperatively as a system.

Benefits of Lean

1. Improving Productivity & Efficiency

When employees focuses on delivering value, they will be more productive & efficient, because they won’t be distracted by uncertain activities.

2. Focus

By making use of Lean methodology, you will be capable to lower waste activities. So, your workforce will be focused on activities that bring value.

3. Better Use of Resources

When your manufacturing is primarily based totally on real demand, you may be capable to use only as many resources as needed.

Lean Principles

Lean principles had been first brought in the book. The Machine That Changed the World (1991) by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos.

1. Identify Value
2. Value Stream Mapping
3. Create Flow
4. Establish Pull
5. Pursuit Perfection

1. Identify Value

What is the aim of every company? Moreover, To provide a product/service that a customer is ready to pay for. Certainly, You need to define exactly what it is that the consumer wants. Customers in general do not define value based on where it is made & how it is made. Customers want their requirements satisfied swiftly, they want particular products, with specific capabilities, at a certain price. So, you first need to identify the value that you want to deliver & then move on to the next step.

The use of Quality Function Deployment (QFD), Brainstorming as well as other ideas can help an organization to define exactly what the customer sees as value.

Value– Value, which is defined by the customer and is something that the customer particularly wants. Still, we waste most of our time doing something other than adding value. Moreover, Studies show that we tend to only add value to a product or service for just 5% of our time.

The rest of the time we spend in wasteful activities; we are waiting, reworking, transporting, moving & a bunch of different wasteful things that the customer does now no longer consider to be something that they should pay for.

These are the seven wastes of lean tools and lean process and mostly what we do within a lean manufacturing implementation is to find out these wastes to remove them.  But this often going about lean the wrong way. So, We need to find out the value-adding steps & make those as efficient and free of waste as possible.

If we just look for waste, we tend to begin working on improving processes that are in themselves wasteful & unwanted by the customer. We end up making non-value-adding processes more efficient.

Leader’s Tip
Make sure that goals and objectives are aligned across the organisation and place more emphasis on the long-term advantages of lean principles than on immediate gains.

2. Value Stream Mapping

Value stream mapping shows the series of workflow processes that produce the value. It has to include all actions & people involved in the process of delivering the end product to the customer. Furthermore, A value stream map is created to discover all the activities engaged in the product.

Value stream mapping will show you where value is being generated & in what proportion several parts of the process do or do not produce value. Moreover, The value stream of lean principles mapping helps to identify & remove non-value-added activities. This helps you to reduce the process delays & therefore improves the quality of product/service.

• Value streams– They can be constructed for each major product/process that an organization produces. The activities are viewed in terms of the following criteria.
• Value-added Activity- These activities add value to the process as recognized by the customer. So, They improve processes for productivity & quality.
• Enabling Value-added Activity- These activities do not add value to a customer but are necessary for the continuity of a process.
• Non- Value-added Activity (Muda)- These activities do not add any value to the process or products. Thus, It can be eliminated. They shape the wasteful steps. So, A customer doesn’t pay for the expenses related to these activities willingly.  Instead, if present unduly they bring about customer dissatisfaction. 

Within lean we are looking to remove or minimize those non-value-added steps.

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3. Create Flow

After mastering your value stream, you need to ensure that the lean process of each team remains effortless. The ideal flow would be “single-piece flow”, although this is often not achievable due to machine setups & the need to flow several product streams through individual machines or cells. Additionally, Barriers & interruptions may appear at any time. 

But what we are trying to attain is the “flow” of products or value from one step to the next, each step being a value-adding step. This flow is attained through some ideas & tools from Kanban, through cell design, and so on. So, You can break up work into smaller batches & visualize the workflow, you will able to easily detect & eliminate process roadblocks.

The quality level of each operation is very high, near-perfect using several defect elimination as well as detection techniques. So, These techniques include:

• Poka-Yoke: To prevent defects from processing to the next step.
• Source Inspection: To catch errors & to correct the process.
• Successive Checks: Checks by the next lean process & check what to correct in the process. So, The work of departments, people, functions & firms will need adjustments to the value stream to make it flow & to create value for the customer.

4. Establish Pull

The biggest waste in any system is inventory; Inventory causes so many wastes. Thus, Inventory takes up space, it needs stacking, storing & transporting. Having a stable workflow ensures that your teams can deliver work tasks much quicker with less effort. However, to secure a stable workflow, ensure to create a pull system.

In such a system the work is pulled only if there is a demand for it & when a customer makes the order.  Most mass manufacturing production companies are within side the push production mode. Each operation produces as much as possible & sends it onto the next operation. It helps to diminish inventory levels.

Let’s take an instance of the restaurant. You go there & order a burger. The chef pulls your order & starts making your burger. He doesn’t prepare lots of dishes in advance because there isn’t actual demand & these lots of dishes can turn into a waste of resources. This lets you optimize resources’ capacity & deliver products/services only if there is a real need.

By using kanban systems & “supermarkets” it is possible to set up your production so that customer orders can be swiftly satisfied when they are made.

5. Pursuit Perfection

After going through all 4 steps, you already developed your Lean management system. However; with the support of your employees, you require to seek perfection; delivering exactly what the customer wants when they want it at an acceptable (Minimum) price with zero-waste. You can also apply lean principles to improve user experience.

Remember, your system is not fixed & isolated. Problems may occur at any of the previous steps. That’s why engaging every employee within your company to make sure continuous improvement of each & every aspect of your company by implementing lean tools such as Kaizen. Moreover, There are other techniques to motivate continuous improvement. For instance, every team may have a daily stand-up meeting to discuss what has been done, what requires to be done & possible barriers.

Lean is about improving every other process from order processing to invoicing as well as customer service.

Perfection is attained through:

• Using technologies to remove mud.
• Product teams working with the customer to find better ways to specify a value. Enhance flow & achieve pull.
• Developing new products.
• Using collaboration between the value stream partners (subcontractors, distributors, suppliers, customers & employees) to reveal more value & diminish Muda.

Conclusion

At last, Lean is now broadly recognized as a fundamental business philosophy. So, Lean management is more like a guide for developing a stable organization that evolves consistently & helps to identify wastes & eliminate them. It’s been seen that organizations that consistently practice Lean are more innovative & competitive, which in turn allows them to be more profitable & sustainable.

4 Best Lean Principles Books

Global Reader’s Click Below:

1. A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance
2. The 12 Principles of Manufacturing Excellence: A Lean Leader’s Guide to Achieving and Sustaining Excellence, Second Edition
3. The Lean Six Sigma Pocket Toolbook: A Quick Reference Guide to 100 Tools for Improving Quality and Speed
4. The Lean Turnaround: How Business Leaders Use Lean Principles to Create Value and Transform Their Company

India Reader’s Click below:

1. Lean IT – Principles to Practice: Toyota Way to Create Value for the Customer & Wealth for IT Organization
2. Creating a Lean R&D System: Lean Principles and Approaches for Pharmaceutical and Research-Based Organizations
3. Lean Principles and Application in BPO
4. The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

Frequently Asked Questions

Key Takeaways

• Value: Recognise the benefits to the customer and align procedures to deliver them quickly.
• Value Stream: Identify the entire process flow and get rid of steps that don’t offer value.
• Workflow: Improve workflow to get rid of bottlenecks, delays, and excess inventory.
• Pull: Establish a structure where work is started in response to client demand.
• Encourage a culture of continual improvement to promote effectiveness, excellence, and innovation.