Lean

2018-01-10

2022-02-13

5 min. read

“The practice of removing areas of waste from daily producers to increase efficiency and quality work” - Paul Akers

Lean Goals
Eliminate waste
Part of a process which does not add value for the customer
Reduce Costs
Improve quality
Increase speed and response time
Lean companies are fast to design and release new products to the marketplace, to deliver on time every time and to answer customer inquiries.

Lean is not a program it is a Strategy

Lean focuses on 2 aspects
Competitors
Customers

Competitors become more challenging everyday.
Customers become more demanding everyday.

Kaizen
Japanese philosophy for continuous improvement

Attitude that anything can be made better.

Kaizen Blitz - a project that is executed quickly and dedicated to solving a problem or fixing a process immediately

Lean is CSI in ITIL

Lean Processes
Process Map
Identifies the sequence of activities in a process
Where does it start?
Where does it end?
What is not part of the process?

2 Steps to a process
Tasks
Activities

5 Symboles
Oval - Start and end
Rectangle - Specific task or activity
Triangle - Wait time
Diamond - Decision Point
Arrow - Direction of flow.

Start with a large scale map.
Fill in the details as required.

Value Stream Analysis
“Continuous improvement is not about the things you do well - that’s work
Continuous improvement is about removing the things that get in the way of work.”

Non-value added steps

Start with the customer and end with the customer
Seven wastes of lean
Transportation of people, supplies and parts
Excessive Inventory
Unnecessary Motion
Waiting
Over-processing
Overproduction
Defects

Lean Improvement Cycle.
Define Value (from customer perspective)
Map the value stream
Create flow (improve on process map)
Establish pull
Seek perfection

Business Process Reengineering
Rethinking and redesigning processes to better serve customer needs

Describe the process
What product or service do you provide?
Determine the output of the process
What outputs does the process have?
Determine costs
Total cost for the total process
Consider how to re-engineer the process
Decrease cost and increase output

The principle of ideality
“Instead of thinking outside the box, get rid of the box”

The most ideal solution is one that does not exist - or does not exist at the moment.

Look at different industries for ideas.

The Elegant Solution
“Customers don’t want products and services… And when it comes to solutions, simple is better”

A solution in which the optimal outcomes is reached with the least amount of effort

Kaizen - Continuous improvement in small incremental steps.

3 Principles of Toyota
Ingenuity in craft
Innovation is an individual responsibility (everyone)
Pursuit of perfection
Rhythm of fit
Solution that fit at the right time.

The cost of complexity
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” Leonardo da Vinci

Pareto principle (80/20 rule)
20% of products produce 80$ of the revenue.

Get this book: “conquering complexity in your business”

Rules
Eliminate complexity customers will not pay for
Exploit the complexity customers will pay for
Minimize costs of the complexity you offer.

The theory of constraints

Maximize throughput

3 Levels of throughput
Company Level - rate of cash generated by selling products
Factory Level - rate at which products are made
Equipment level - rate at which an individual machine produces output to help make products

Get this book “The goal”

Proposes to maximize factory throughput by efficiently management bottlenecks

Anything limiting production throughput is a constraint to the system

Visual Factory
Kanban Cards
Just-in-time

Lean Manufacturing

Lean Services

Lean Thinking

References
https://www.lynda.com/Project-Management-tutorials/What-lean/590824/678713-4.html

https://www.lean.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5S_(methodology)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering