What is Lean?
Lean is a management system for increasing customer value by solving problems and reducing waste. A Lean organization builds the capacity of all its employees and engages them to continuously improve processes to increase performance and impact.
Lean comes from the Toyota Production System, which enabled Toyota to become the world's leading automotive manufacturer. Lean is now used in factories and offices across the globe in every sector to achieve strategic competitive advantage. See the image for the Seven Principles of Lean.
What is a Process?
Whether we are designing, building or assembling a product, hiring or onboarding new staff, developing a proposal, conducting a marketing campaign, paying salaries, creating a budget, purchasing supplies, creating reports or making travel arrangements, the things we do again and again are processes. Put simply, Processes are how we do our work.
Here is a more precise definition: A process is a repeated sequence of actions that transforms inputs into outputs and leads to a valued result for the customer. We must always remember that the process exists to provide value to a customer, where that person is inside or outside our organization.
What is Process Excellence?
Process Excellence is the vision of the ideal process . It provides a "north star" or goal to aim for when designing or improving how we work. Excellent processes will enable us to deliver the greatest value with the fewest resources at the right time in the right way and at the right cost. Excellence is not a destination. It is a journey. Excellence comes not from reaching our goal but from pursuing it.
No one and no process is excellent by accident. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.” In this quote generally attributed to Aristotle, we see that excellence comes from habits that we practice daily. For this reason we developed the Seven Habits...
What are the Seven Habits of Process Improvement?
The Seven Habits of Process Improvement are seven things that everyone can do every day to improve how they work in pursuit of Process Excellence. The first three habits establish a stable foundation for how the organization operates. The second three focus on optimizing performance. The last is a way of thinking and a methodology for making all improvements.
- Organize the Area (5S) - Ensure workspaces are clear, structured, and efficient.
- Make Work Visual – Use visual tools to communicate key information.
- Standardize Work – Define and practice the best-known way of working.
- Eliminate Waste - Identify and remove activities that don’t add value.
- Prevent Mistakes - Find simple, low-cost ways to perform high quality work.
- Make Work Flow - Reduce delays, hand-offs, defects, batch size and unevenness.
- Solve Problems - Don't blame people but address problems at the root with PDCA.
How does Lean Work?
Lean continuous improvement is not something an expert does for or to people. The people who do the work are the best positioned to improve how they work. This shows them respect and draws on their experience and expertise. It also gives them ownership and responsibility for improvement. Lean CI works by growing and empowering people who solve problems to improve processes, leading to better performance and increased prosperity for all stakeholders
Why Pursue Process Excellence?
You may think it's not worth pursuing Process Excellence. After all, trying to make things perfect can waste a lot of time and energy. Why not stop at "good enough"? But pause for a moment to think about the benefits of pursuing excellence. Excellent processes...
- Enable your people and your organization to achieve greater impact, to provide more value to your customers and more benefit to the people you serve.
- Lead to happier customers (or donors for non-profits) because they more easily get greater value from you at a lower cost.
- Reduce burden on your employees and make their work more meaningful and engaging.
- Promote personal and professional growth of every employee and increase market share.