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Lean thinking is a management framework made up of a philosophy, practices and principles which aim to help practitioners improve efficiency and the quality of work. Lean thinking encourages whole organisation participation. The goal is to organise human activities to deliver more benefits to society and value to individuals while eliminating waste.
The term "lean thinking" was coined by mechanical engineer and MIT graduate student John Krafcik in 1988, who subsequently went on to run Google LLC's autonomous driving unit for many years. [1]
Lean thinking is a way of thinking about an activity and seeing the waste inadvertently generated by the way the process is organized. It uses five key principles:
The aim of lean thinking is to create a lean culture, one that sustains growth by aligning customer satisfaction with employee satisfaction, and that offers innovative products or services profitably while minimizing unnecessary over-costs to customers, suppliers and the environment. The basic insight of lean thinking is that if you train every person to identify wasted time and effort in their own job and to better work together to improve processes by eliminating such waste, the resulting culture (basic thinking, mindset and assumptions) will deliver more value at less expense while developing every employee's confidence, competence and ability to work with others.
Lean thinking was born out of studying the rise of Toyota Motor Company from a bankrupt Japanese automaker in the early 1950s to today's dominant global player. [3] At every stage of its expansion, Toyota remained a puzzle by capturing new markets with products deemed relatively unattractive and with systematically lower costs while not following any of the usual management dictates. In studying the company firsthand it appeared that it had a unique group of elders ( sensei) and coordinators (trainers from Japan) dedicated to help managers think differently. Contrarily to every other large company, Toyota's training in its formative years was focused on developing people's reasoning abilities rather than pushing them to execute specialist-derived systems.
These sensei, or masters in lean thinking, would challenge line managers to look differently at their own jobs by focusing on:
The idea of lean thinking gained popularity in the business world and has evolved in three different directions:
Experience shows that adopting lean thinking requires abandoning deeply engrained mainstream management thought routines, and this is never easy. The three main ways to adopt lean thinking are, unsurprisingly:
In the lean thinking tradition, the teacher should not explain but demonstrate – learning is the full responsibility of the learner. However, to create the proper conditions for learning the lean tradition has adopted a number of practices from Toyota's own learning curve. The aim of these practices is not to improve processes per se but to create an environment for teachable and learnable moments.
There are two controversies surrounding the word “lean,” one concerning the image of lean with the general public and the other within the lean movement itself.
Lean has repeatedly been accused of being a form of turbo-charged Taylorism, the harbinger of productivity pressure, detrimental to employee's health and autonomy at work. Unfortunately, some company programs calling themselves “lean” have indeed had a severely negative effect on the business and work relations. [4] This problem arises when senior leaders do not seek to adopt lean thinking but instead delegate to outside consultants or internal specialist team the job of “leaning” processes. Lean thinking very clearly states that it seeks cost reductions – finding the policy origins of unnecessary costs and eliminating at the cause – and not cost cutting – forcing people to work within reduced budgets and degraded conditions in order to achieve line by line cost advantage. There is no doubt about this, but to many managers, the latter option is far more expedient than the former and it's easy to call “lean” a cost-cutting program. Nonetheless, this is not that, and any approach that doesn't have the explicit aim to develop lean thinking in every employee should not be considered to be "lean".
These controversies largely emerge around the radical organizational innovation proposed by lean thinking: putting people first rather than systems. [5] In this, lean thinking departs markedly from mainstream management:
Lean thinking at senior level creates leaner enterprises because sales increase through customer satisfaction with higher quality products or services, because cash improve as flexibility reduces the need for inventories or backlogs, because costs reduce through identifying costly policies that create waste at value-adding level, and because capital expenditure is less needed as people themselves invent smarter, leaner processes to flow work continuously at takt time without waste.
Lean thinking goes beyond improving business profitability. In their book Natural Capitalism, authors Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins reference lean thinking as a way to sustain growth with less collateral damage to the environment. Lean thinking's approach, seeking to eliminate waste in the form of muri (overburden), mura (unlevelness) and muda (unnecessary resource use), is a proven practical way to attack complex problems piece by piece through concrete action. Toyota industrial sites are well known for their sustainability efforts and well ahead of the "zero landfill" goal – all waste recycled within the site. [8] Practising lean thinking offers a radically new way to look at traditional goods and service production to learn how to sustain the same benefits at a lower cost, financially and environmentally.
This article has multiple issues. Please help
improve it or discuss these issues on the
talk page. (
Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Lean thinking is a management framework made up of a philosophy, practices and principles which aim to help practitioners improve efficiency and the quality of work. Lean thinking encourages whole organisation participation. The goal is to organise human activities to deliver more benefits to society and value to individuals while eliminating waste.
The term "lean thinking" was coined by mechanical engineer and MIT graduate student John Krafcik in 1988, who subsequently went on to run Google LLC's autonomous driving unit for many years. [1]
Lean thinking is a way of thinking about an activity and seeing the waste inadvertently generated by the way the process is organized. It uses five key principles:
The aim of lean thinking is to create a lean culture, one that sustains growth by aligning customer satisfaction with employee satisfaction, and that offers innovative products or services profitably while minimizing unnecessary over-costs to customers, suppliers and the environment. The basic insight of lean thinking is that if you train every person to identify wasted time and effort in their own job and to better work together to improve processes by eliminating such waste, the resulting culture (basic thinking, mindset and assumptions) will deliver more value at less expense while developing every employee's confidence, competence and ability to work with others.
Lean thinking was born out of studying the rise of Toyota Motor Company from a bankrupt Japanese automaker in the early 1950s to today's dominant global player. [3] At every stage of its expansion, Toyota remained a puzzle by capturing new markets with products deemed relatively unattractive and with systematically lower costs while not following any of the usual management dictates. In studying the company firsthand it appeared that it had a unique group of elders ( sensei) and coordinators (trainers from Japan) dedicated to help managers think differently. Contrarily to every other large company, Toyota's training in its formative years was focused on developing people's reasoning abilities rather than pushing them to execute specialist-derived systems.
These sensei, or masters in lean thinking, would challenge line managers to look differently at their own jobs by focusing on:
The idea of lean thinking gained popularity in the business world and has evolved in three different directions:
Experience shows that adopting lean thinking requires abandoning deeply engrained mainstream management thought routines, and this is never easy. The three main ways to adopt lean thinking are, unsurprisingly:
In the lean thinking tradition, the teacher should not explain but demonstrate – learning is the full responsibility of the learner. However, to create the proper conditions for learning the lean tradition has adopted a number of practices from Toyota's own learning curve. The aim of these practices is not to improve processes per se but to create an environment for teachable and learnable moments.
There are two controversies surrounding the word “lean,” one concerning the image of lean with the general public and the other within the lean movement itself.
Lean has repeatedly been accused of being a form of turbo-charged Taylorism, the harbinger of productivity pressure, detrimental to employee's health and autonomy at work. Unfortunately, some company programs calling themselves “lean” have indeed had a severely negative effect on the business and work relations. [4] This problem arises when senior leaders do not seek to adopt lean thinking but instead delegate to outside consultants or internal specialist team the job of “leaning” processes. Lean thinking very clearly states that it seeks cost reductions – finding the policy origins of unnecessary costs and eliminating at the cause – and not cost cutting – forcing people to work within reduced budgets and degraded conditions in order to achieve line by line cost advantage. There is no doubt about this, but to many managers, the latter option is far more expedient than the former and it's easy to call “lean” a cost-cutting program. Nonetheless, this is not that, and any approach that doesn't have the explicit aim to develop lean thinking in every employee should not be considered to be "lean".
These controversies largely emerge around the radical organizational innovation proposed by lean thinking: putting people first rather than systems. [5] In this, lean thinking departs markedly from mainstream management:
Lean thinking at senior level creates leaner enterprises because sales increase through customer satisfaction with higher quality products or services, because cash improve as flexibility reduces the need for inventories or backlogs, because costs reduce through identifying costly policies that create waste at value-adding level, and because capital expenditure is less needed as people themselves invent smarter, leaner processes to flow work continuously at takt time without waste.
Lean thinking goes beyond improving business profitability. In their book Natural Capitalism, authors Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins reference lean thinking as a way to sustain growth with less collateral damage to the environment. Lean thinking's approach, seeking to eliminate waste in the form of muri (overburden), mura (unlevelness) and muda (unnecessary resource use), is a proven practical way to attack complex problems piece by piece through concrete action. Toyota industrial sites are well known for their sustainability efforts and well ahead of the "zero landfill" goal – all waste recycled within the site. [8] Practising lean thinking offers a radically new way to look at traditional goods and service production to learn how to sustain the same benefits at a lower cost, financially and environmentally.