Lean Results: What an organization wants to achieve with its lean efforts

Interesting question isn’t it? We all talk about lean. We talk about lean implementations and its concepts tools and techniques. But why an organization would want to have a look at lean in the first place?

Without any doubts most of the businesses look at lean as a must have for their success in this competitive world. Everything is very competitive these days. Finding a job, passing an exam, earning enough money to live are things we face in our day to day lives. Similarly organizations want to appeal to their market, they want to sell stuff and beat all the competition. They want more profits. They want to satisfy the market demands quicker while using lesser resources. They want to be stable in their business or they want their business to be healthy in long run. They need an effective way to do this. So they look at the proven, time tested and well known lean techniques for help.

Let’s look at few of these objectives in detail.

Higher profits - This will help organizations to do what they want to do without money is being a barrier. Just like you would like to have tons of money to spend every organization would like to larger profits and more money with them. This will help their business obviously as excess money can be used to do more investment and to make more money. This money can be used to make their employees happy by giving away bonuses and taking them on trips. This extra money can be invested on their learning and making them more skilful.

Shorter Lead Times - When the lead times are shorter, organizations can produce more within the given limit of time or they can relax without running so hard. For an example if the cycle time is 30 mins per finished item, for a working day organization would manufacture 16 items when we take the average working day of 8 hours. But if they can reduce this cycle time to 20 mins, now they can produce 24 items. This means they will produce 8 items extra and they will increase their revenue by 33%. If they have no demand or no need for some reason to increase the production, they can use the extra 80 minutes a working day to make their employees happier by providing trainings, letting them enjoy more free time. Remember free time is an investment. It is not a waste. Employees can use this free time for something useful.

Stable business - Stability is a real measure of health of the business. It doesn’t matter how well you can do something today at this point of time, how you can do things in long term is really important for the survival of the business. Just like any of you look after your health a business would love to look after its health. This will give certainty and sanity every organization is looking for.

If any organization can achieve all the above objectives without actually working extra or burning extra resources, they will survive in this competitive business world.

With or without really knowing lean has achieved all these objectives. It has proven all these can be achieved simultaneously without compromising on each other. You wouldn’t want to compromise your health to earning money, would you? Just like that any organization should not compromise things to achieve something else. This is really important. Lean can achieve all these together.

Time tested and robust lean concepts and its proven tools has helped lean organizations to achieve their results by eliminating wastes, opening countless opportunities for improvements and keeping good systems in place. Importantly lean has framed things in a whole new way; people will start to see things in complete new light. They themselves will find very simple solutions to their problems.

I am not going to discuss each and every lean tool and concept here. We have done it number of times. I invite you to think how each lean tool and technique will be able to use to solve problems in your organization.

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