Companies that utilize Six Sigma are increasingly making a concerted effort to implement Lean into their existing framework for process improvement. For many, the combination of Six Sigma’s emphasis on process characteristics and Lean’s focus on turn-around time leads to more high-impact, fast-hit projects. However, organizations have to meet a tough obstacle to gaining that advantage: Incorporating Lean principles without rippling into the current Six Sigma formation. If the implementation of Lean is not executed correctly, this can result in more disadvantages than success stories.
Lean was baptized out of production methods, but the world of information work and management has changed in recent times. It encourages the practice of constant improvement and is premised on the basic idea of individual rights. In their novel “The machine that transformed the world” Womack and Jones described the five principles of Lean manufacturing. Let us check how to incorporate these lean principles into the service industry.
Start Small and Identify a Change Agent
The good idea is to continue with a small team and then disperse the Lean practices through divisions, gradually converting the whole business into a Lean organization.
When you operate at a business level, you can create a temporary pilot group of members of various departments so that they can act as agents of transformation after returning to their original teammates.
For instance, if you have a broad R&D division that consists of several teams working separately, you can ask each group for volunteers.
A smart method to guarantee they are suitable agents of progress is to choose only candidates who are not only lively but also active in their departments ( e.g. senior managers, informal leaders, etc.). When you have laid a stable base, incorporate the five Lean management concepts.
Lean project management techniques will be incredibly useful in managing the daily processes, regardless of the scale of the business or the organization’s activities.
Five Lean Principles In Service Industry
Here are the five fundamental principles for service industries that drive lean thinking:
Define Value
In order to properly understand the first concept of consumer value meaning, it is essential to consider what value is. Price is what the clients are willing to pay. Discovering the customer’s real or implicit desires is of vital importance. Clients may not understand what they want or may not be able to express it. This is particularly important in the case of new goods or technologies. There are many strategies, such as interviews, polls, quantitative statistics, and web analytics, that can help you decode and uncover what’s important to consumers.
Using these qualitative and quantitative methods, you will be able to discover what consumers expect, how they want to offer reasonable service and the price they afford.
Value Stream Mapping
In an Analyze Stage of a DMAIC scheme, A value stream map could be generated in the Study of a DMAIC project that determines the progress of materials and data and classifies activities into three sections: enhancing value, creating value, and adding non-value. This method focuses on defining and removing the non-value-added behaviors in each process phase and, where appropriate, reducing the processing period between successive steps. Even so, value-enabling actions can not be removed from a system entirely. Instead, they may be classified into value-adding and non-value-adding activities, enabling the removal of certain value-adding activities that are not rated.
These exclusions help make a method more manageable – an advantage for programs aimed at minimizing the complexity of in-process changes. This technique may also be part of a Kaizen method, integrated into the Processes of Assessing and Developing.
Creating Flow
Project Managers can detect duplication by measuring the value source. Some activities which are completed too early, too late, or repeated frequently result in waste. Lean project managers can establish the optimum flow of operations by evaluating the map and disposing of waste.
Lean project administrators are looking for potential setbacks and bottlenecks. If some shortfalls are found, activities can need to be reordered. Often project managers may also opt to incorporate value-adding activities for process enhancements.
Ideally, each move should flow into the next, starting at the factory (or organization) and delivering seamlessly to the consumer as a finished product.
Build Pull
The 4th of the Lean principles, after you have built a workflow, will be asked to create a pull framework. The concept is easy, just start new work when it’s needed, and your team has spare power. Your goal should be to generate value that your consumers need and to prevent overproduction.
Let’s have a look at how tasks are handled in a pull system vs the traditional push paradigm to envision it better:
A job is generated in a push method and then delegated to a developer. Everyone, usually a sort of boss or team leader, takes the production systems that need to be completed and then transfers them to the members of the team. Simply put, the job is imposed on the people who would do it.
The activities which have to be processed are stored in a queue in a pull strategy. A developer that doesn’t work on anything else at the moment will go to the waiting list and take the product with the utmost importance they can work on. The people doing the work pull out the assignments and begin processing them.
Seek Maturity
Lean management at heart is about constant change. Lean management needs a meticulous approach to any move. Optimization must be one of the very corporate strategies. Any part of the company must work for waste reduction, value addition, and quality delivery. Lean agencies, there’s still space for change.
Applying the Lean Principles in Service Industry
The five Lean principles offer a basis for building an effective and productive organization. Lean gives administrators the ability to find inefficiencies in their company and provide more value to clients. The concepts promote the design of improved workflows and the implementation of a culture of quality improvement. By following all five steals, a company will stay competitive, improve the value it provides to consumers, decrease business costs, and increase its profitability.
In Summary
A useful application of Lean involves a thorough comprehension of the philosophy underlying it, beginning with Lean’s five principles. That’s why you require to get your time in the corporate sense and find the right way to make things work. You should: As you take the first steps to build a Lean process:
- Bring the Lean idea to the organization to make sure they appreciate the planned transition and how it influences the business as a complex
- Start by distinguishing value-added from needless operations
- Describe the value stream on a Kanban board that you are presenting to your client
- Build a seamless flow of product distribution by either alleviating or securing the bottlenecks in your network to your client
- Just take out new work when you need it, and you have a spare room
- Adopt the required culture to ensure the quality progress of the method
To know more about the Lean methodology and how you can make the most of it, one should consider pursuing popular Quality Management certification courses from an accredited training provider.
Some of the popular Quality Management Certification courses that individuals and enterprise team members can take up are:
