LEAN SERVICE

The Lean Rules as they apply to people are:

Fairness: The Lean process needs to be fair, fair to both staff and the business;
Firmness: Once you decide how things should be done, they need to be done that way;
Consistency: Be consistent with how you deal with people, problems and issues.

Benchmarking is much more than simply copying competitors’ best practices. Dr Edward Deming, a leading American statistician who developed many of today’s leading quality tools and approaches, wrote:

To copy is too risky, because you don’t understand why you are doing it. To ADAPT, and not adopt, is the way.

In an office, forms of waste include:
Counting;
Moving;
Looking for papers;
Reworking;
Filing;
Sorting;
Reconciling;
Checking;
Duplicating.

Edward Deming, a leading American statistician who developed many of today’s leading quality tools and approaches, wrote:
To copy is too risky, because you don’t understand why you are doing it. To ADAPT, and not adopt, is the way.

The Lean Service approach is based on two basic, but mutually supportive, elements:
Lean tools and techniques, and
The ‘Way’ – capturing the hearts and minds of the people.

Many managers of service businesses think it is easier to deliver Lean in a manufacturing environment because ‘you only have to deal with machines’. This is a commonly-held belief but it is not correct.

In a service business, the delivery of value is very much customer- or client-dependent. The client defines what they see as ‘value’, not the business. The most successful service businesses understand this very well and spend much time and effort working to better understand their customers and to meet their spoken needs and often unspoken wants. In a restaurant, not every client wants lots of attention from the staff, not everyone wants the same level of service, and not everyone is pleased by the same things. It is important that a service business understands the core of its delivered value and the spectrum of its clients if it is to deliver its true value.

a service business, the primary resource is people. Most services are delivered by people, so a Lean Service business needs to understand its people, how they add value and how this value-adding process can be optimised.