LEAN MANAGEMENT

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Table of Contents:

1. Lean Management

2. What is Lean Management?

3. Who can use Lean Management?

4. Lean Management’s Principles

5. Manage your tasks with Kanban

Lean Management:

We can start this presentation by stating that lean management is not a defined set of principles that can be neatly arranged in topics: lean preaches continuous improvement, motion, not static.

As its principles define, it’s constantly moving and evolving – and so should you.

What is Lean Management?

Lean management is a general approach to running an organization in a way that supports the principle of continuous improvement: seeking to achieve small, incremental changes with the goal of improving efficiency and quality in your processes without huge impact on the environment and everyone involved.

Eliminate waste:

By identifying and tracking all the steps in your business processes, this management style seeks to eliminate all types of waste – time, effort or money you’re wasting.

Your main goal should be to establish an workflow that works well without interruptions, material/resources accumulating without being used, the need to repeat steps, etc.

Who can use Lean Management?

Lean's roots go way back in manufacturing – read about Toyota Production System to learn more – but it can be applied to any industry or service company with the single goal of optimising processes and eliminating all of the steps that don’t generate value.

Be a part of the process:

Challenge your employees to innovate and suggest ways of eliminating unnecessary steps – involving your team members in strategical improvement decisions is key since they’re the ones actually using the processes you wish to improve.

If you ask people to think and give you ideas other than just imposing your own improvement ideas, you’ll be stimulating them to think and making them feel like they are truly part of the process.

Practice what you preach:

This improvement model of asking those who actually do the job to think, experiment and learn from the results is what’s proposed by lean management.

It’s a participative other than detached management approach: it humbly observes, challenges, encourages and learns other than arrogantly bossing employees around. It’s the ultimate “practice what you preach” philosophy.

Learn and improve:

Lean management is a process of constant learning and improvement from the obtained data.

It can’t be defined as a still or fixed concept – you can’t just copy what this or that company did and worked for them, mainly because, as people have their particularities and are unique, so are companies and their processes.

You’ll be more accurate defining lean management as a philosophy – a way of thinking – other than just a method or a technique.

Lean Management’s principles:

We’ve already pointed out the need of optimising towards generating more value - so it’s important that you’re aware of Lean’s definition of value.

It’s based on the customer’s point of view, not the company’s owner or board of directors or anyone else’s.

Through this point of view, value is anything that will stimulate the purchase of your product or, even more directly, make the customer want to give you money for what you offer.

Process Optimization:

In order to properly optimise your processes, you’ll first need to map them, identifying all the steps you take – from the beginning to the end – so that later on you’re able to cut off those that are only generating cost without adding to the customer’s value perception.

All the steps that do generate value should also be optimised in order to eliminate all the possibilities of waste.

Lean is all about the application of the known and effective scientific method of experimentation and study of work processes and systems to find improvements.

Continuous Improvement:

Lean management’s philosophy is based on a culture of continuous, incremental improvement that’s practiced by every employee and team, at every organization level.

It’s not something defined by high management and shoved down everyone else’s throats. Lean’s philosophy encompasses a lot more than just processes, it’s about the respect for people, for everyone’s voice in the processes – the customer’s, the employees, the people who actually get the job done.

Continuous Improvement:

It’s important you keep in mind that these principles are cyclical and should be continuously repeated in the search of better processes each time – you customer’s perception of value is not static and neither should you, as they evolve, you have to evolve to if you don’t want to be left behind.

Lean Management Tools:

There are a lot of tools that can help with the technical aspects of the continuous improvement process, such as Poka-Yoke, Kanban, continuous flow, etc.

Lean management is not just social or just technical: it’s a global philosophy that searches continuous improvement while changing people’s perceptions of their organisation and systems.

Manage your tasks with Kanban!

Pipefy’s Team Task Management Template was specially developed to help you manage your team’s tasks without breaking a sweat.

This template shows you in an organised and simplified manner what everyone is currently doing, what they have to do, and what is already done. It also highlights what are the priorities, what’s on time, what’s late and what’s potentially creating bottlenecks.

Start managing your processes on Pipefy!Enjoy the 30-day free trial and leave mistakes in the past.

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