Be a Lean Machine! Get rid of doing things that add no value
By Dr Jeanne Fredericks
The Lean philosophy is simple. Understand your customer and reduce wasteful activities. It is as simple and as complex as that. Yet, there are often roadblocks in trying to achieve a Lean culture in an organisation. Here are some roadblocks (and countermeasures!), that may help you with establishing a Lean culture in your organisation.
1. But, we are making money… Clearly, we don’t need to change!
Look, the customer of yesteryear and the customer of today are not the same. Today’s customer is more empowered and won’t feel too bad for going to your competitor. They will even TikTok about it! So, for how long do you think you will continue making money if you don’t get products and services to the customer quicker & with more convenience? To make executives think about this, I often highlight the competitors that are disrupting their industry of operation. I have yet to find a Disruptor that does not operate with customer excellence in mind and who does not have more streamlined business processes.
2. But, I’ve always done it this way…
… yes, and we also used to drive around with horses and carriages! If there are quicker and better ways to do what needs to be done, what is holding you back? Sure, it requires getting out of your comfort zone and learning new things. But, imagine what you can do with the extra time you have at your disposal if you do things more efficiently. And this is usually the question I ask when I hit this roadblock. “If you had an extra hour in a day, what would you do?”. Sometimes the act is work-related, other times it is personal. Irrespective, use the answer as a carrot when people are hesitant to embark on the journey and use it as motivation when it gets a little hard and people want to regress to old ways.
3. I’m too busy doing my job, there is no time to think about how to improve it!
Ah, this is a classic. I start by asking the person who raised this “roadblock” the following, “How can you save 5 minutes a day?” Usually, the answer is very obvious and easy to implement. One such example was a simple change to how a column in excel was formatted. It took a developer 7 minutes, once off, to change the format, but saved the report creator 12 minutes per report per week. String enough of those 12 minutes together and the report creator saved hours! By asking this simple question, you can start to land the concept that being Lean relies on incremental improvements that build up over time and sometimes require only a few minutes of thinking about how to improve.
I follow this question up by asking the person’s line manager, “How do you collect ideas from your team to save 5 minutes a day?”. If they do not (and usually they don’t), I suggest that they make this a regular agenda item in an existing forum and start a dialogue. I also highlight that an idea is only as good as its implementation, so they shouldn’t drop the ball in implementing solutions.
Last thoughts
Building a Lean culture is more than just sending people on White-, Green- and Blackbelt training that the organisation treats as a tick-box exercise. Moreover, it certainly is not a bunch of templates, idealistic ideas, and buzzwords that are thrown around without actually changing anything. It is consistently and continuously looking for an inference of a better way of doing things. It is empowering staff to reduce their own sources of frustration. It is mobilising leaders to align big-picture thinking to operational excellence, and it is getting comfortable with admitting that we do waste time and resources. Nothing is perfect, therefore, we reflect and improve whenever and wherever we can.
For reducing waste in your business processes or cementing a Lean culture contact us at hello@thechangehub.co.za.