Lean Principles

The following eight principles need to be observed to achieve a successful lean transformation.

Customer Focus

In Lean practice, the customer is your number one boss. You have to give them what they want or you lose business. Ultimately it's the customer who defines what value they want from a product. Your responsibility is to deliver this value on time and at the lowest possible price. It's a simple equation. Eliminate the activities that add no customer value and you will be more competitive on price, quality and flexibility. This means more business to you.

Basic System Stability

Before starting on a Lean journey the organisation should have  general predictability and consistent availability in terms of manpower, machines, materials and methods. Without having these 4 items under control you will not be able to create a baseline from where to start making improvements.

Leadership Support

Full management support for the Lean implementation is required. The number one reason why Lean initiatives fail is because management is not fully committed. If Lean is a “grass roots” effort, it will have limited success. Senior management needs to understand that lean is not a one of project with fixed start- and end-date. Lean is an ongoing journey.

Employee Empowerment & Protection

Within a Lean organisation every person is responsible identifying and eliminating waste. This can only be accomplished by having employees who are given the responsibility and are accountable for the accomplishment of improvements. The reality of employee empowerment is that not all employees want to be empowered nor does management always desire them to be empowered. Without a total commitment that is consistently reinforced this concept will fail.

Moreover as the organisation becomes more productive, jobs may becoming (partially) obsolete. It is paramount not to make people redundant but to re-allocate them to other activities. Employees who notice that the lean initiative is utilised to reduce headcount will very quickly stop contributing. Lean should be used to drive growth, not just save money, and a clear growth strategy should be devised at the outset of a lean initiative. If an organization feels that it has to layoff employees because customer demand has eroded or the company has failed to be competitive, it should layoff personel before starting the Lean initiative. Use Lean to get the plant back into competitive shape afterwards.

Training

To implement Lean successfully, cross-functional training is required so that an employee is always ready to do the next most important thing for the organization. It leads to involvement and increases communication. Not only Lean skills training but also cross functional training is required so that employees can better understanding the impact an improvement will have on the rest of the organisation. Provide training only when you need to, when it's time for people to actually use the tools on the job. There should be no lag at all between learning and application.

Communication

When an organization undergoes a major transformation like Lean, management often makes the mistake of under-communicating to employees by a factor of 10. For example, they may communicate once or twice in meetings or organizational documents, but never really integrate the new vision into all communication materials in a consistent, across-the-board way. Once the transformation is underway, management’s goal should be reinforce using all types of communication (newsletters, emails, meetings, memos, etc).

Continuous Improvement

The focus on value and the elimination of all forms of waste from all activities also means a Lean approach uses the principles of continuous improvement – when you fix something, you review it and fix it again simply beginning from a new starting point. Perfection is the goal and continuous improvement the route to achieving it.

Performance Management

The three most basic metrics of Lean are Quality, Cost, and Delivery (or Service Level). Do not make metrics overly complicated or meaningless. They must make sense to everyone in the organization because they are tied-in to your organization’s objectives. Remember “What gets measured, gets done.”