Lean Management? What is it?

Lean management definition: Eliminate waste to improve operational outcomes.

Lean is a management philosophy that emphasizes creating value for the customer by eliminating waste. Lean focuses on reducing the amount of time needed to go "from farm to fork." In order to achieve significant improvements in operational results, lean management places a strong emphasis on assisting with the successful deployment of "Lean technology."

The most important principles of Lean Management

Lean Management is based on 5 important principles:

1. An organization must identify the wishes of the customer and thereby capture the customer’s perception of value.
2. An organization must capture the value flows of processes and eliminate wastes within these processes. The following questions can be useful here:

• What activities directly add value for the customer?
• What activities do not directly add value (but are necessary for operations), and how can these activities be restricted to a minimum?
• What activities do not add any value whatsoever and can therefore be eliminated?

     3. The organization must create an uninterrupted flow of products or services.
      4. The organization must prevent overproduction. This can be done by making sure that no production takes place that is not required by the previous step in the            process (this is called ‘Pull’).
      5. Keep striving towards perfection. The organization must create a culture of improvement.

What does Lean Management yield?

In Lean Management, the human capabilities within an organization are deployed in a smart way to create the most value possible for the customer. The successful implementation of Lean Management results in a more efficient organization offering consistent quality and greater profitability.

How does the implementation of Lean Management work?

The basic principles behind Lean Management are fairly easy to understand. This means that, at first glance, the implementation of Lean Management might not seem a technical tour de force. But because the thought patterns of an organization must change and because it must source the capacity needed to apply change management, Lean Management certainly requires thorough training and professional support to start with. Management and employees must understand one another and ‘be on the same page’. Many change initiatives end in failure because little attention is paid to the culture of change that is necessary in order to truly become an organization that constantly improves ‘spontaneously’.

‍