Are lean techniques applicable in a service oriented industry or office environment to let's discuss this with another story. One of the telecom companies had its own back office operations. Let's call this company as x for the time being. The back office operation of company X was involved in several activities including maintenance of customer accounts, billing, adding or deleting phone numbers based on customer requests, email support, among others. Another telecom company company by started its back office operations in the same city and started poaching employees of company X to join them. With a new and attractive packages offered by the new competitor, company x started losing its talent pool.

While there were efforts initiated to retain the losing talent Most of the situation was going out of control for them. They were left with the choice of hiring new recruits, training them and bringing them on the shop floor at the earliest. However, there was another problem. Their training cycle time was as long as three months. So they decided to reduce this training cycle time. They found the project team created a Value Stream Map of the three month long training, identified waste in the system and focused on eliminating that waste.

They used lean tools such as hygiene QA, also known as load leveling, value, Stream Map, and fibers to cut down the training cycle time from three months to 30 days. That's the reduction of almost one third of the cycle time. Wow. Every system contains waste, whether one is producing a product, processing a material or providing a service, there are elements which are considered waste. The techniques for analyzing systems identifying and reducing waste and focusing on the customer are applicable in any system. And in any industry.

Any implementation of lean techniques will be different depending on various factors such as industry, internal culture, and internal business considerations. The tools used to implement lean operations and the order in which one combines them are highly dependent on whether a company is a discrete manufacturer, continuous producer or provider of a service.