Lean management refers to managers who maximize values for stakeholders at the least cost and with minimal wastage. It is doing more with less.
Great question! That seems to be a good way to improve your effectiveness. But remember, when you talk about a business all you need to focus is on your profit. The best business strategies are the ones that reduce costs and improve revenues. If you can manage to negotiate with your direct stakeholders and reduce costs, that's a great start but your revenues must increase as well otherwise it will not have any effect. Whenever you fail to achieve profit on a business you will face some harsh times. If that strategy guarantees revenues on a specific business then it is the right strategy for that enterprise.
Mahfuz great question. The answer is yes. Lean management is a very important part of lean thinking which is a philosophy that needs to be applied in a holistic manner. It will have a customer focus. In a lean managed system there will be no expediting orders, over production, and excess inventory. To do this there are a number of tools that ensure the following:
1. Focus on effectively delivering value to your Customer
2. Continuous improvement of the system
3. Improve the Value Stream by eliminating all types of waste
4. Maintain unidirectional Flow
5. Pull Through the System (make to order)
6. Strive for Perfection
Yes we can improve organization`s effectiveness through lean management,
If you get to set all the parameters with weighting coefficients, it will be an excellent optimization problem with constraints that will be solved by a mathematician or software, it will take in consideration all that you bring into the program.
The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize. - Shigeo Shingo
Yes if it is lean but not over thin.
But some cost-cutting exercises are presented as a lean mangement strategy.
Lean management is defined as “a systematic approach to identifying and eliminating waste (non-value added activities) through continuous improvement by flowing the product at the pull of the customer in pursuit of perfection.” (Green Suppliers Network, 2009) and “… maximizing customer value while minimizing waste.” (Lean Enterprise Institute, 2008).
Even in the most structured organizations, you can find that many workplace processes are chaotic and disorganized. There’s incomplete or outdated documentation, duplication of effort, different people carry out the process in a slightly different way, or the same employee does something slightly different each time. This is stressful for employees and costly for organizations.
Most of our processes don’t start out this way, but over time, small changes occur and workarounds are developed rather than going through a complete overhaul. Sometimes work is pieced together out of necessity and nobody really gives it any strategic thought or considers how it will affect the big picture. Usually this isn’t a problem because we are knowledge workers—we adapt our thinking to compensate for what is an inefficient process. We make it work.
The problems occur when a key employee leaves and takes that knowledge with them or a new employee is hired and needs to be trained on all the exceptions. When a process is difficult and requires a lot of mental concentration, we are also prone to making more mistakes and errors when we are tired, overworked, or otherwise not functioning at our best. In some jobs, this is a critical flaw in terms of risks and outcomes.
This is an opportunity for process improvement using lean principles. The lean philosophy emphasizes creating more value for customers with fewer resources through optimizing the flow of work. The outcome is a more organized state of operation where employees have access to tools they need, they are empowered to deliver delightful customer-service, cost savings are realized due to efficient processes and workflows, and all this leads to profitable business results.
Lean management expands on the idea of working both efficiently and effectively to best use resources while meeting stakeholder expectations. Lean management uses additional analysis to reach the optimum balance between effectiveness – providing the service or product that the recipient wants when he or she wants or needs it – and efficiency – providing this service or product with the optimal use of resources, including time, money, and people.
Lean management may be a useful approach to process improvement where individuals:
• Chase information to complete a task (there is an ‘information shortage’)
• Deal with multiple decision loops
• Are interrupted while trying to complete a task
• Focus on ‘expediting’ reports, purchases, or similar outcomes
• Do work in batches, collecting a certain amount of work before starting the task
• Find work is lost between organizational units
The goal of Lean is to have a steady, even flow of work in the unit or for the individual while also providing what the recipients want in a timely manner. To do this it is necessary to:
• Determine the value of the product or service to the recipient(s), who may be:
- a customer,
- the immediate recipient
- the stakeholder, a person who has an interest in the product or service
- students, parents or others from outside the organization
- faculty or staff working within the organization who are ‘downstream’ receiving the product or service of another internal unit, and
• Identify resource use and activities that do not contribute to the value of the product or service.
The desired outcome of Lean management is to standardize and streamline the process so that more time can be spent on more complex or unique services, products, or components.
While implementing lean management process improvement can be quite involved and detailed. The following are some basic principles that should be respected:
1. Focus on your customer. Ultimately, what all customers want is value. Value creation occurs when the quality of services received is perceived as high compared to their cost. What does your customer want and how can you provide it better, faster, cheaper?
2. Figure out how the work gets done. We have lots of assumptions about how work gets done that don’t mirror exactly what happens. After all, during the day-to-day grind, we don’t think about how we do the work, we often just do it. Ask an outside observer to record the steps of the process in a way that he/she could repeat it themselves if they had to, without assistance.
3. Remove inefficiencies and waste. Once you know what the workflow of your process looks like, take a second look at any step in the process that doesn’t directly create value for the customer. Manage, improve, and smooth your process flow to eliminate non-valued-added activity (e.g., wasted time, wasted movement, wasted inventory due to overproduction, customer delays, waiting for approvals, delays due to batching of work, unnecessary steps, duplication of effort, and errors and rework).
4. Track numbers and manage by evidence. Sometimes what should work well doesn’t. Test out your process, collect data on how well it is working, highlight and eliminate errors, and seek continuous improvements in value. Seek proof; don’t assume an improvement has been made.
5. Empower the people operating the process. The best person to improve a process is the person who carries out the process. Utilize employee’s full skillsets—can someone be doing more? If the process is improved, they will likely have time to take on higher level work.
6. Go about all this in a systematic way. Your process is not perfect and if by some miracle it is, it won’t stay that way for long. Changes will occur that will demand changes in the process. Being able to replicate the steps of process improvements is the key to delivering long-term, sustained value.
Through lean management,we are basically trying to eliminate any NON VALUE adding activity. Value addition is looked at from the end customers point of view. Lean is also about streamlining structure. It also means removing FAT. The FAT could be in terms of inventory, manpower, paper work etc..
Naturally lean practices will lead to enhancing organisational effectiveness.
I understand as "lean management" something like Toyota managements system.
I think that this model is the one that replaces the old system of Taylor, and from this perspective is a system from which we expect the renewal of the production process.
YES. we can improve organization`s effectiveness through lean management...
Lean involves all the 7M's of Management -
MEN
MACHINE
MATERIALS
METHODS
MONEY
MARKET
MANAGEMENT
The prime linkage to LEAN is through PEOPLE MANAGEMENT which is almost FELT & LEAD Contribution.
Please see the link of our work in Dr.Reddys Laboratories (Pharma) where 42 people we engaged in carrying out 400 peoples work wherein the same infrastructure was available. Please check the following URL....
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Krishnan_Umachandran/contributions?ev=prf_act
YES......!!! Lean management have a quantifiable impact on organizations as management effectiveness often relies on new skills and patterns of behavior. Lean management effort is as good as managers ability to define success for his or her area to create a shared sense of accountability across the organization. An effective management system relies on metrics and targets which makes real time performance transparent and ensures that the organisation responds to performance signals appropriately and effectively. Improved management systems usually include clear measures of success for each process area and easy mechanisms. A lean management approach improves the workforce's organization and skills and it helps the public sector streamline processes by addressing the causes of organizational inefficiency, building the management systems and capabilities to sustain new ways of working and engaging managers and staff to make continuous improvement a part of every employers day to day job.
Lean management and lean production are different.
Lean management can improve organisational effectiveness to the extent that the organisational strategic orientation is not compromised. However, lean management may not achieve its goals if its underlying assumptions no longer hold. These assumptions are particularly related to the culture of the organisation. I think it would make sense to consider lean management as a collective system of actions and a culture at the same time. Actions by all members of the organisation who work towards developing and sustaining that culture.
Dear Friends,
I trust in lean management; four reasons:
- Because our world does not have enough regard for the rights and does not differentiate enough humanity and materiality. Lean management is a way relearning the upper value of the intention and therefore of the subject to the object.
- Because it is a way to avoid waste and cut cost, to save time and generate intelligence, and revenues.
- Because in the city where I live and work,stay the headquarters of Michelin company, whose management is based on lean management and derives profit and consideration for its employees (not enough).
- Because my city is the birthplace of one of the greatest French philosopher Blaise Pascal who wrote "le Moi est haïssable"...which meant that being good and doing well are above to seam and to do anything or anyhow.
Regards.
Jean.
Dear All,
May I suggest to have a look at this contribution about lean management and its effect on sustainability. The empirical analysis indicated that the impact of lean management, and to a lesser extent supply management, on environmental performance is mediated by environmental practices.
Best Wishes,
Mark
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652612003666
Increasing Efficiency and Effectiveness Through Lean, Innovation Insight Series Number 23, http://www.psu.edu/president/pia/innovation,
http://www.opia.psu.edu/sites/default/files/insights023.pdf
According to me, the answer is Yes! We can we improve organization's effectiveness through lean management.
Maximization of values for stakeholders at the least cost and with minimal wastage is one of the most important thing for organization effectiveness and learn management deals with that.
Regards,
Nitish
The simple answer is yes. However, which lean management techniques to use will influence how effective will be its outcomes or results.
I agree with Nitish that some techniques will have better impact on cost and organization effectiveness than others. In an engineering or manufacturing organization, I have experienced that Knowledge-based Lean (KBL) management technique provides better returns on cost and time than others. You may find description of Knowledge-based Lean management technique in the following papers:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258884943_A_KNOWLEDGE-BASED_SYSTEM_ENGINEERING_PROCESS_FOR_OBTAINING_ENGINEERING_DESIGN_SOLUTIONS?ev=prf_pub
Conference Paper A Knowledge-Based System Engineering Process for Obtaining E...
Many thanks to Mark, Jeremiah and Brian for quality and informative references recommended. Jean
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