Principles of lean. Lean originated in manufacturing and this is where the concept of lean manufacturing came from. Lean operations refer to using clean both in manufacturing and service industries. There are many reasons why you need lean. First of all, you can improve the overall quality of your processes and services, you can deliver better, faster, and using less resources, because lean will optimize your operations. Secondly, you will achieve standardization of your processes.
Having standardized operations means predictability, your customer will know when to expect your product and you will always be able to meet his needs. Lean takes the customer view when the process is designed. What are the key customer requirements that you need to meet? Lean also helps you remove the waste from your processes, waste that does not add value to your customers. Lean has been around for decades and has been successfully implemented in different industries and areas of economic life all over the world. As we already mentioned, lean is not only deployed in manufacturing, but also in improving services in different areas such as Hotel Management, it call centers, finance, education, and others.
Lien has been used for driving improvements in managing government agencies, managing public health funds, hospitals, etc. Some of the typical problems that lien can solve are related to improving the work practices. Such as eliminating errors in databases, mistakes in one's area of work around deliveries, but planning that only to generating losses. The complicated procedures and processes mean longer delivery times. The complex and unclear working procedures and confusing roles and responsibilities impact the customer in a negative way. No matter if we talk about the customer of a hotel chain, a patient in a hospital or a customer of an IT company who calls with the request to solve an issue that he is experiencing.
Now imagine a service that takes minimum time the information is clear, the customer receives exactly what he wants and when he needs it. This is lean. However, lean is not a miracle but a structured approach based on data measurement, but also on a desire to change the customer experience so that the customer is seen patient to contact us again for a service, or recommend us to his friends. In 1908, the famous car manufacturer for it introduced Model T, a modular car that was built using interchangeable parts. This approach helped him pioneer the flow production in 1934 placed equipment on a production flow, which allowed him to produce cars much faster and more efficiently using a moving assembly line. Later, Henry Ford added product variety to the manufacturing process and introduced the term mass production, Ford was able to automate the flow of materials to miles of conveyor belt and the assembly line was throat to 50 more manufacturing plants around the world.
During the 1930s Edward Deming created the process to do continuous improvement. Known as plan do study act cycle. After the Second World War, Deming was able to teach the value of PDSA statistics and other quality improvement methods to Japanese businesses. In this way, Deming made a significant contribution to Japan's innovative high quality products and its economic power was born out of that. Throughout the 1960s, the Toyota Motor Company gradually developed a management system based on Lean principles in 1963, to honor let the process of turning to your to production system into an integrated framework with a focus on problem solving, leadership, production operations, supplier cooperation, product and process development and customer support. He developed a new perspective of just in time production when he visited the US in 1956.
He went to visit the US automotive plant, but it was actually impressed by the US supermarket as a dead time to punch not have many self service doors on I was impressed by the strong customer focus and how stock was supplied in an efficient manner. It was a format driven by customer demand and not production. In 1990, the term lean was coined in Jim warmack book The machine that changed the world. warmack focused on fulfillment product design support management, customer support Global Management System pioneered by the best Japanese companies backed up by significant evidence the book demonstrated the superiority of the Japanese system when compared to European and us industries. Let's have a look at some major principles of Lean management at the center of lean is the customer customer is at the center for processes of the organizations and the customer defines which activities are adding value and which are not.
Lean is focused on those activities that do add value and it promotes decreasing or eliminating those that are not important for the customer. This is how lean guarantees that it can provide only high value activities for which the customer will be willing to pay. The concept of flow is very key in lean. Eliminating the wastes helps create a high quality process. When the flow of activities is limited or he has some interruptions or delays. Then we have a problem.
Lean helps processes work without interruptions. The word pool is used to define the way in which products or services are provided to them. Customer with poor days are provided only at customer requests, nothing is produced or delivered on top of what is requested. From there we derive the principle of just in time, which is one of the principles of Toyota production system. That is the time in which a product is produced or a service is delivered. This period of time is also related to the customer demand.
How often is a product or service needed so that we make sure we produce and deliver on time, but not more than what is needed. Each one of us would like to receive quotes without defect services without delays at the right time for us. Lean helps achieve all this. Lean is the view also fee for excellence that can be applied everywhere, in any country, in any organizational culture and most importantly, Brings efficiency, which means more and more here because dimmers and happier and more engaged employees. The lean concept has been around for a few decades already, it is a method that looks at the processes in a structured way that allows companies to reduce the activities that do not add value, and they do not need and in this way, add more value to the customers. The Japanese term muda means waste and waste is considered everything that is not value adding, if you spend a lot of time waiting for approvals, or for work to be handed over to you.
These are examples of waste. Lean processes run with less effort, less time, less talk and less space. And as a result of implementing lean, what you can expect to be a faster, cheaper, easygoing process that has many happy customers at the end of the day. And help your employees who can focus their efforts on real value work. When we talk about implementing clean, we have the following sequence in mind. First of all, start with the customer and define what the customer wants and what the customer defines as value adding, so that you know where to forks.
Once you know that you need to map out your process so that you create a value stream that captures and differentiates value adding from non value adding activities directly try to decrease or fully eliminate those non value adding steps disassemble the process, then you need to ensure the pool principle is in place. That is a step in the process becomes needed only when the previous one is complete. This means that you will not be able to over produce or deliver at a time when your product is not needed, as this intern can generate inventory and Therefore waste. Once you remove the non value adding steps, test your process for completeness and its ability to deliver what it is designed to deliver. Keep moving and continuously improve your process until you're confident that a state of near perfection is reached. Investing in measurement to how the process is performing is a good way to keep it on track.
And notice any signals of deviations on time to be able to proactively fix before they become big issues or before your process gets off track, if not sustained and controlled processes tend to go back to the original state