Susan Clapham shares a company article (aka continuous improvement) that ensures results and a case study to demonstrate the outcome of following the principles.
Lean is a holistic approach to on-going organizational improvement.
4 Principles of Lean:
- Top Leadership commitment and involvement to an overall transformation… at a building materials client, the CEO and the leadership team adopted lean as strategic initiative that still remains today nearly 10 years later
- Engage the organization in the cultural improvement effort… as a frontline supervisor of 50 people at Otis Elevator, my team implemented 5 suggestions/person/year… meaning nearly every day we implemented one idea (reminds me of the multivitamin One-A-Day)
- Continuously strive to reduce waste and increase value added time… at an aerospace client, we freed up millions of dollars of working capital by analyzing the discrete steps of work that the A/R department used in order to create, send, and collect invoices… we reduced the original work content by >40% repurposing 16 hours of work/week/person into collections
- Use lean princi;ples (respect for people) and tools (OEE, mistake-proofing) in a pragmatic fact-based way to create value… an employee who was skeptical about participating in their new company lean effort later said, “This helped make my job simpler and easier”
Download the PDF and case study from ClaphamConsulting.com.