Lean Management

LEAN IN PRODUCTION AND SERVICE The script shape LEAN was put together to describe and in the flesh(predicate)ize Toyotas ph star line military action during the 1980s by a research police squad headed by one Jim Womack, Ph. D. , at MITs international Motor fomite programme. According to them, the image of LEAN was fathered by Taiichi Ohno of Toyota. Ohno educateed a contrasting approach to the mass output methods of US car firms through necessity.Later, in 1996, Jim Womacks team up espoused the five rock principles and too draw tools that they believed were the sneaking(a) for Toyotas success. According to Oxford dictionaries, disceptation instrument efficient and with no wastage. The effect idea of dispose is to minimize wastage and at the same m maximize client measure out. Customer take to be is of utmost importance to a argument organisation and the organization give focus on its key soures to march on increasing the value. Ultimately, the goal is to pro vide the perfect value creation carry through that has no wastage.To accomplish this value creation and zero wastage goal, draw opinion changes the focus of a management from optimizing separate technologies, assets and vertical departments to optimize the lam of fruits and pee through accurate value streams that flow horizont whollyy across technologies, assets and department clients. By reducing or eliminating waste along the entire stream of value, we exit be able to come up with processes that would fatality little effort, less space, reduced capitals and reduced time in ordinate to make products and proceedss at prices far less than normal and with few defects.Organizations will be able to be responsive towards ever-changing customer inescapably and wants with a lot of variety, high quality, reduced costs and with less throughput multiplication. Information management will also be very much simpler and much more accurate. Lean management is a concept which a rse be applied in every melody and every process. It should non be comp ared with a cost reduction program or tactic because it is a direction of cerebration and acting that applies to the whole organization.Nowadays, it is common that handicraftes across all industries and answers, including the health care and even governments around the world are applying the concept of proclivity as the way they think and lock up their business. Many of these organizations does not use the word lean out of choice and tend to track their practices as their give system, such as the Toyota Production ashes or the Danaher line of business System. It is done to instill a point that lean is not a simple programme or a short term ost reduction solutions, however the way the party operates. the term Transformation or lean Transformation are usually used to characterize a fellowship that is moving from an old way to a lean thinking way. this fault requires a complete transformation on ho w a company usually conducts their business, thus, requiring long term perspective and perseverance through the changing time. It is also interesting to note that the concept of lean in production and service has the touch of one of the great management thinkers, W.Edwards Deming who had great get to on in Japanese manufacturing. He believed that the enclose manufacturing scenario is a prison of interacting masses and stressed the importance of re-inventing the management processes in order to chance on higher efficiency and value. In practiceing lean in production or services, I will be following the concept espoused by Womacks team that stressed on three fundamental business issues that will be able to guide the transformation process of an entire organization into a lean organization.In order to achieve lean objectives in an organization, it is important first of all to note that the organization and the people leading the transformation need to involve a lean plenty. I n order to develop this lean vision, we apprise concentrate on three fundamental business issues which are Purpose, Process and People. By thinking deeply into these three aspects, a lean implementer kindle try to answer critical questions on the vision of the organization. If we are able to answer the key questions that I have associated with to apiece one of the aspects, I believe that we can develop a vision for lean implementation in our organization.The questions would be- 1. purpose what are the customer problems will the organization try to solve in order to achieve their own purpose of prospering? 2. Process how will the organization assess each major value stream devised to make sure each measure in the value stream is valuable, capable, available, adequate and flexible? 3. People how will the organization ensure that every important process in the value stream has several(prenominal)one responsible for continually evaluating it in terms of business purpose and also le an process?How will everyone involved in the value stream be engaged actively in the process of operating it correctly and continually improving it? As for the next tread that I would say, it would be on the possible implementation of the core lean principle into my organization. This, I believe would involve the core of lean which is fundamentally waste reduction. Usually, in an organization including production and service oriented organizations, we can find seven basic types of waste, which I am listing below. ? Producing goods and services beyond the immediate need of the customers. Unnecessary movement of products due to piteous layout cookery. ? Wasted motions when working. ? Time idling and wastage. ? Implementing processes that are unimportant to finish a product. ? Poor inventory management. ? Many defects in the done for(p) product or output. Usually, waste will be interpret in any activity that does not add any value to the finished product or services. By trying to eliminate waste, the material velocity will be summation drastically. This means products will reach the customers hand in a very quick manner.This is an advantage because it delivers high strategic advantages beyond the intelligible cost savings. Bad quality will be eliminated and lead times are shortened effectively. Eliminating waste can be considered as a strategic goal in service oriented and manufacturing oriented organizations. As I have mentioned before, elimination of waste will ensure increase in strategic advantages such as increased income and increased customer satisfaction. In adapting lean processes and services, we may be confronted by some constrains and challenges. The adaptability of lean depends on the nature of our business.We have to remember that there is a spacious difference in between the service and production industries, and it lies in the cite that creates the variation that causes waste to happen. Logically, manufacturing trading operations are far more manageable compared to service assiduity, because of its laboratory like settings compared to the service industry. Uncertainty usually does force from material and labor inputs, but we can still search those uncertainties and take steps to control it to a great extent. For example, Toyota, pioneer in lean management is production/manufacturing based organization, and the employees, product esign and the production tools are usually under the control of the operations to a great extent, rendering it easier for implementers to anticipate uncertainty and implement the efficient lean management. In contrast, service organizations operate in a vast sea of uncertainty and risks and when uncertainty is present, it is much harder to anticipate and control variability that will be present together with it, For example, a throw off management company. We know that each project that the company will receive or implement will be unlike in nature.The volatility of the service ind ustry, in particular a project management company, requires that lean management principles is implemented on a field of study by case method, i. e. different implementation and methods for different projects. This nature of the service industry is contributed by a few causes. Lets look at these causes one by one- ? Uncertainty in task times. It is the nature of service products that the execution of each and every service delivery has some uniqueness. pickings the example of the project management company, each project taken may not be similar to each other, thus making it surd to judge the task time needed.This variability in the service industry leads to a negative exponential distribution of task times. This simply means to say that most of the tasks execution will fall within a tight range, and some execution will take a womb-to-tomb time. Considering airplane boarding as another example, there is uncertainty present in the sense that it will take different amount of time a mong different groups of customers to board the plane. ? Uncertainty in demand.While there are ways to forecast demand in service industry, we cant claim that it is 100% perfect. Usually, manufacturers buffer this forecast uncertainty with some finished goods inventory, but this is not the case in the service industry for example, we can forecast that reservations for a hotel will increase during peak seasons but it depends on many other fluctuating factors. Sometimes it is very hard to forecast the demand of individual customer. As an example, a wedding planner essentially does planning job for customers wedding, but this lanning differs based on customer preferences, reckon and also other factors. This uncertainty renders each wedding and the process that the organization goes through to put together the wedding, a unique one. ? Customers production roles. As we can see from both the uncertainties above, we can summarize that it has much to do with customers. This is because typ ically, customers have some role to play in the production of a service, we introduce variability based on how well we perform our roles.Customers roughly always have to provide some information to the service agents to father service, and we usually have some tangible tasks to perform. So, as I have already stated it before, this condition create unique situations that needs personal implementations of lean in order to make sure wastage is reduced and value is delivered to each individual customers. Lean implementation involves finding solutions that will be able to offset the challenges and difficulties that we may face in our organization to achieve a successful outcome that will support a agonistic operations strategy.Professors Kent Bowen and Steven Spear (HBS DBA 99), drew on a framework of 4 principles of the Toyota Production System that they believed will reduce the constrains, difficulties and challenges to a minimum in order to enjoy leaner productions and service. The framework contains 4 easily implement able rules- linguistic rule no. 1 all work should be highly specific as to content, sequence, timing and outcome. Rule no. 2 every customer-supplier connections must(prenominal) be direct, and there must be an obvious yes or no ways to send request and receive responses.Rule no. 3 the pathway for every products and services must be simple and direct. Rule no. 4 any improvements must be made in accordance with the specific method, under the guidance of a teacher, at the lowest possible level in the organization. Basically, my plan for a successful implementation of lean depends on the 4 rules given above, but I am going to give it some twist with adding some additional techniques that I feel would encourage faster and easier ways to pass over challenges faced by organizations implementing lean.I am going to add a three step initiative taken by Wipro, an Indian computer software developer, which can boost the implementation of lean, which ar e- Abolish Hierarchies. Devise a bottom-up organization that allows many people to have a field-wide learn of the process to spot problems and identify efficiencies. Continuous Improvement. Using kaizen initiative. Encouraging organizational level knowledge sharing through effective and efficient work improvement. Lean Tools. Use of tools specific to the process based on lean principles which can be used to pinpoint wasted time and effort.A combination of both these initiatives, I believe can lead to a lean flow which will be the tool that I would utilize to mitigate the challenges that can be faced during lean implementation. Drawing up a process flow chart that represents each step that a product/service would go through is essential. It is advisable to represent these successive processes graphically in a flow chart. This is the first step towards an illusion and waste free production. For each and every products or processes that are present in the process flow charts, a nother level of details is required.This involves the task-level work with associated , with associated work-content times, with associated work-content times, quality verifications and worker qualifications. We can also produce a product/process matrix with products on the vertical axis and processes on the naiant axis. At every intersection of product and process, this matrix, or spreadsheet should be recording the total reasonable validated work times that has been devised. We must also be able to calculate Takt. Takt is a German word which basically mean beat, pace or rhythm.Businesses, especially service oriented business must march to the beat of the customers and we must keep up with our customers pace.. Takt, can be calculated as, work time per day divided by customer requirements per day. This calculation represents how often each process must be performed, and at what capacity level, to take care of your customers needs and demands and be able to meet it as soon as possi ble. In order to have sustainable lean benefits, the implementation of lean must bridge the gap from project to project and also business practices. fictional character documents procedures, policies and measures must reflect and drive Lean as a way of life. This will ensure success in reducing waste. Planning and procurement drives daily lean execution. Lean manufacturing is more responsive, with shorter lead time and greater mix and volume flexibility. We must be able to change our planning to take full advantage of lean. Bibliography Womack. J. P, Lean Enterprise Institute Inc. 2009, What Is Lean (Online) Available at http//www. lean. rg/WhatsLean/ (Accessed 20th October 2009) Ahlstrom, P (2004) Lean service operations translating lean production principles to service operations International Journal of run Technology and Management, Vol 5, nos 5-6 pp545-564 Spear and Bowen 1999 Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System Harvard Business Review Sept-Oct Womack, J. P. and D. T. Jones 1996 Lean Thinking New York, Simon & Schuster. Taylor FW 1998 The Principles of Scientific Management capital of Delaware Publications New York. First published in 1911Ohno, T 1988 Toyota Production System Productivity Press Portland, Oregon. Translated from Japanese original, first published 1978 David McPhetrige, 2009, An industry advisor provides guidance on implementing a basic Lean plan. MPO magazine. (Online) Available at http//www. mpo-mag. com/articles/2009/09/meeting-the-challenges-of-lean-flow (Accessed on 21st October 2009) Hanna. J, 2007, Bringing Lean Principles to Service Industry. Harvard Business direct (Online) Available at http//hbswk. hbs. edu/item/5741. html (Accessed on 21st October 2009)