How to Know if you are doing Good Lean

How to Know if you are doing Good Lean?

You have been practicing lean for quite some time now but, you aren’t sure if you are doing good lean. If this is the case, then you are not alone. There are many others like you who have the same questions wandering in their mind, and you have come to the right place to find an answer to this question.

The most important thing that matters is if you have got a sensei or not. Just like with any learning, along with regular practice, having a master is important, so is with lean. Your relationship with your master is a very important element in the process of learning. He will be able to guide you on every step in the process. If you don’t have one yet, you should try to have one as soon as possible. However, until you find one, you will be worried about whether you are doing good lean or not. Here is what you need to know.

Your intent

First, ask yourself what your intent is. What lean program are you intending to follow? How hard are you willing to work? These are the questions you need to ask yourself to analyze your intent for working towards lean. Ask yourself the following few questions to know how hard you are trying.

• Have you been to the gemba?
• Have you found a customer satisfaction issue and defended your customer?
• Have you found a safety issue and defended problem solving to protect your employees?
• Have you found a rework case and discussed the problem with the employees to understand what the problem was and how they managed to solved it?
• Have you found batch thinking and tried to provide flexibility and more variety to the customers, and worked towards one product/service at a time?
• Have you encouraged your team to analyze their performance and work method, and come up with better ways to perform their tasks?
• Have you learnt how you can make further lean improvements in your organization?

You must understand that the most important aspect of lean is that apart from you yourself working towards improving your organization, you need to instill the same feelings within your team members so that they can understand the problem and come up with their own solutions.

Are there visible improvements?

The aim of lean is to improve your performance as well as having others to improve the same too. If you are able to see results with random changes and you assume that what you have done is right, then it does not hold true with lean. In lean, the visible performance should be linked to team members better understanding their working situations and being able to express the change they have seen with what they did before and how they handle  things now. So, knowing that you have done ‘good’ lean is when the team members are able to figure out something fundamental about their working situation and have been able to deliver visible performance improvements.

Try to understand better

It is very easy to master individual tools in lean but, mastering the entire system of lean requires daily practice for years together. When asked at Toyota’s Taipei plant how long it takes to develop a TPS sensei, they answered 30 years! You would wonder why it would take so long for someone to master a practice. There is a reason to this. The lean system has grown over 60 years in different situations and mastering this system is a life-long pursuit.

 

So, in order to know if you are doing good lean, you must first know how serious your intent is, then check for any visible performance improvements that can be linked with the team members who have learnt to perform better, and lastly see if your gemba experiences have changed your own understanding of lean thinking. If you want to have a better understanding of lean, you must keep attending lean workshops and  Lean summit India, where the most enlightened speakers from diverse industry segments and the best known lean sensei in the world come together to teach lean.

Lean Convincing

How can you Impress Managers who don’t believe in Lean?

You might want to apply lean to your organization but, your managers don’t believe in lean methodologies and thus, you get no support. So, you start to try convincing them that lean is beneficial. But, ‘Boss is always right’ and if they say ‘No’ to lean then it should be accepted as a strict ‘No’. So, instead of wasting time to make fruitless efforts, invest your time in practicing lean yourself and see how your managers will support you in a short period of time.

Try placing lean in your processes. Observe and discuss the problems you find. Analyze your goals by asking yourself how you can improve the quality of your products/services, how you can add more products/services to please your customers, how you can reduce your lead time and how you can improve productivity with reduced costs. This way you can improve your own activities.

Also analyze things like how far you are from your takt time, the continuity of your job from start to finish, the possibility of continuing with other tasks simultaneously without having to finish one before moving to the next and how far you are able to satisfy customers’ demands.

In short, observe your own department carefully and apply lean practices so that you can change the way you see things. This will let you know how to increase value and eliminate waste thus, having you to be better organized. This will impress your managers and have them expanding your area of responsibility. This way you will convince them indirectly for lean and move up the corporate ladder faster.

To be able to bring such lean transformation in India, you need to be trained well by lean professionals. For getting information about the best lean training in India, you can visit http://www.leaninstitute.in/

 

How Do HRs Play An Important Role In Lean Transformation

Lean thinking and lean processes require every team member’s association with the organization. But, it is seen that the role of the HR organization is often neglected. The change needed in the HR practices of a company for a lean transformation is never considered. Inconsistency between lean thinking and HR management is a big mistake made by organizations. All the HR activities including employee selection, allowance, bonus, promotions and detention need to be considered for a lean transformation.

Encouraging employees to maintain high-production quantities, great dividends and individual work efforts are not the elements required in lean. There needs to be a change in behaviour to be brought about. Instead of individual efforts, the members need to work as a team to a problem-solving culture. It needs to be understood how people integrate with other elements of lean management to bring in continuous improvement in the organization. You also need to analyze the rift between your organization’s current capabilities and those that need to be developed for lean success. Once you analyze these rifts, the HR team can begin working upon them to reduce these gaps.

Many companies select candidates for employment based on their problem-solving skills. But then, it is also important to continually train the employees for better benefits. It is the role of the managers to develop the members in the organization for lean outcomes. For lean engagement, it is important that you analyze the organization’s strengths and weaknesses first. This will help you identify the capabilities that need to be developed.

There are lean workshops conducted all the year round in different areas of the country, which teach you how lean behaviours and capabilities are affected. These workshops also teach how HR participation in lean process is important. But, unfortunately, the HRs have never been completely engaged within an organization. They are considered only when some help is needed. This is the case with almost every small as well as large company all around the country. In fact, HRs needs to be involved from the very beginning because these are the people who can be most helpful when any changes need to be made.

If you want to learn and understand what lean is and how lean thinking and processes can be applied in an organization, you can attend Lean Summit India that is scheduled on 9th and 10th Dec 2015.

Transform Yourself into a Lean Organization

Lean is the word – be it your body type or organization structure. Lean Organization is a term which is used and rather over used time and again yet is not completely understood by many.

Lean Management Institute of India (LMII) is a nonprofit entity driven towards promoting ‘Lean Thinking’ in organizations in order to provide the best quality services to the customers, with fewer resources and zero wastage. In this blog post we help you understand what does a Lean Organization actually means and how you can transform your organization into a Lean one.

What does Lean mean in Lean Organization?

The essence of Lean is providing maximum customer value and minimizing waste. That is building more values for your customers, but with fewer resources.

A Lean Organization recognizes customer value and thereby gears its key resources towards improving and increasingly it continuously. It does this by changing the focus of management towards enhancing the horizontal flow of products and services rather than simply focusing on separate assets and technologies in the vertical departments. Along with this Lean Organizations aims at bringing down the costs of its goods and services by eliminating waste from the entire value streams.

How to transform your Organization into a leaner one?

You can very easily turn into a Lean Organization, all you need is to be clear about your organization’s mission and goals. Once you are clean on this front, you just need to follow the below given steps.

Honest Assessment of your work practices so that you cut down the current practices which might be inconvenient to your customers. The best example can be cutting down on cost of production by trying to get the raw materials from a local provider rather than from a provider in a distant place. This way not only will you save on shipping charges but will also get your raw materials sooner than before.

Intelligent Cutting Down of the Workforce is the next step. As difficult as it may seem a leaner and more productive workforce is far better than a beefed up one. Think about the possibilities of outsourcing your work rather than spending much more on the in-house team.

Appreciate and Give Credit to your employees for their hard work and dedication towards their work and the organization. This way not only will you motivate them, but will also encourage them to come up with fresh ideas and thereby make meaningful contribution the organization.

Regularly Revise and Improvise your method of operation. This will give you a realistic picture of how your organization is working and where it is lagging behind. Transforming into a Lean Organization is an on-going process, thus regular revision and improvising of your working methods is an important step.

Along with this we recommend that you attend Lean Summits and Lean Workshops on a regular basis to stay updated on the new and fresh ideas and innovations which will eventually help your organization.

Follow these Steps and Find your Lean Inspiration!