Lean

Simply stated, lean creates more value for customers with fewer resources.

A lean organization understands customer value, and concentrates key processes to continuously increase value, while minimizing all forms of inefficiency and waste.

It’s difficult to expect results in your lean improvement efforts when you don’t have an accurate measure of your organization’s readiness and capacity to deliver those results. Our methods provide you with these lean measures, insight into likely obstacles to those results, the evidence to support it & recommendations prioritizing your transformation efforts.

Eliminating waste along entire value streams—instead of at isolated points—creates processes that need less human effort, less space, less capital, and less time to make products and services at far less costs and with much fewer defects, compared with traditional business systems.

Companies can respond to changing customer desires with high variety, high quality, low cost, and with very fast throughput times.

The five-step thought process for guiding the implementation of lean techniques is easy to remember, but not always easy to achieve:

Define value from the perspective of the end customer, by product.
Identify all the steps in the value stream for the product, reducing those steps that do not create value.
Compress the remaining process steps into a tight sequence, so the product will flow smoothly to internal customers.
As flow is refined, internal customers pull value from the next upstream activity.
As value is refined, value streams are identified, wasted steps are removed, and flow and pull are honed. Then, repeat the cycle again with the improved process.