What is lean?

- Everyone is talking about Lean, and no, I don't mean the latest diet or fitness trend. Everywhere I look, companies are exploring how they can apply Lean principles to their business processes, whether they're a manufacturing company or service a provider. But what is Lean? Before we apply this concept, let's define what it is and understand the four basic goals of Lean. Lean is all about the process, or I should say processes, because Lean principles and tools can be applied to every process in every business, like production processes on a factory floor or standard processes used in restaurants or the processes to admit a patient into the hospital. Simply put, Lean is about efficiency, moving material, information, and ideas through a process in a smooth, well-organized manner while removing waste and decreasing costs along the way. Lean is a set of tools and applications that allow us to do just that. Lean has four basic goals that help to define the concept itself. The first goal is to eliminate waste. Waste is defined as any part of the process that does not add value for the customer. Your job is to review a process with the goal of eliminating any non-value-added step. This streamlines the process and increases its efficiency. Examples of eliminating waste include reducing waiting time at service centers, decreasing transportation distances for faster delivery, or eliminating scrap in production processes. The second goal is to reduce costs. Nowadays it seems that nothing is emphasized more than cost reduction. And certainly anything you can do to eliminate waste in your processes will help you to reduce costs. But you can go beyond this by thinking about processes as part of a bigger system, providing your customers with an internet link to track their package shipment can eliminate the need for call center personnel, offering more ATM machines can reduce the number of bank tellers needed, having the customer place their order at the counter allows restaurants to reduce their wait staff. All of these provide sufficient low-cost options to more expensive customer service systems. The third goal is to improve quality. Quality is at the heart of Lean. For processes to become smooth and efficient, machines must be properly maintained, incoming materials must be defect-free, and service staff must be exceptionally well-trained. Products and processes must be designed properly to ensure quality output. I think you can see that reaching and maintaining high levels of quality is very closely connected to eliminating waste and reducing costs. Lastly, the fourth goal is to increase speed and response times. Lean is all about being quick, efficient, and highly responsive to customer needs. Lean companies are fast to design and release new products to the marketplace, to deliver on time every time, and to answer customer inquiries. All of this depends heavily on every aspect of company operations working together as one system. To understand Lean, you must recognize that these four principles operate in step with each other. In effect, they're equal parts of one integrated system. These four basic goals of Lean eliminating waste, reducing costs, improving quality, and increasing speed, lay the foundation for how you can use Lean operating tools to improve performance in your workplace.