Why do you want to be lean?

I was reading an interesting white paper titled “Extending the lean enterprise” by Aberdeen group some time back (you can download this for free by visiting this link). Some information on this whitepaper caught my attention, especially regarding what pressures drive lean manufacturing requirement.

According this research, most of the organizations (79%) are going for lean manufacturing to reduce overall operating cost of the organization. The distant second was pressure to achieve shorter lead times. This shows how much people believe in the ability of lean to reduce costs and improve their bottom lines. But interestingly this study also shows there is no single unique path followed by all these organizations to achieve these results. Most of these world class organizations have used their own ways in achieving these results although most of them are aligned with their common goal of reducing the cost. This is something important to note. As I always said throughout this blog there is no one single unique way to solve your problem, in other words a solution delivered perfect results to another organization will not be effective in your context.

Another important thing to note in this white paper is the time it has taken for lean followers to achieve world class results. Generally it has taken in excess of 5 years for lean followers to achieve truly world class performance. This means lean is no quick fix to your problem, but a shift over a period of time. You will climb the ladder with small steps over a period of time. Longer you go down your lean path, better you will get.

Most of the best performers of lean have extended their lean efforts away from manufacturing to other areas like procurement, sales and supply chain. Moving from lean manufacturing to lean enterprise is essential to achieve the best from lean. Manufacturing is only a tiny part of your value creation process. Lots of waste occurs outside manufacturing. Without solving these there is no way an organization can achieve world class performance.

Lean organizations according to this report are managed by people who understand the concepts of lean. In the days of TQM (Total Quality Management) quality is identified as a responsibility of management not entirely of the worker. Similarly it is very important for a lean organization to have a leadership who understand lean concepts and follow them. Managers will be working to achieve these lean objectives which will result in lower costs, lower lead times and higher quality. Workers will support the system by adding their suggestions in continuous improvement processes.

I really enjoyed reading this report. It was very informative. In fact I have sent the link for you to download this before. You can download this report for free by following this link.

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