Lean manufacturing, planning and implementation

One guaranteed way to fail in lean is rushing on lean initiatives and implementations. Lean means change and improvement. Traditionally people will want to show the results as soon as possible to their higher level managers. They will set tight timelines and work towards them and will implement new systems. But effectiveness of these changes and new methods are questionable and most of the times fail in long term.

Once the possibility to improvement is identified, it is very important to asses the opportunity and the effect of change to the organization. Then this has to be planned out and then has to be implemented. As oppose to a traditional organization that plans very quickly and tries implementing, a lean manufacturer will use almost 80% of the time of in planning the improvement and doing pilot runs. On the success they can do the implementations with minimal of efforts and to the maximum benefits in the remaining time. Pilot small scale implementations prior to the full scale implementation will give the chance of correcting the unforeseen errors without affecting the business. This reduces the chances of failures almost to zero.

This is a good lesson to anyone. Use more of your time in planning and assessing the solutions and then implement to get the best results.