To Lean or not to Lean
- Subbarao Chaganty, Senior Consultant, Infosys
Paying my sincere respects to William Shakespeare for his most famous phrase “To be or not to be” from Hamlet, I took the liberty of reconstructing this phrase to lead us to an important topic.
I’ve come across quality and process improvement methodologies like Six Sigma, CMMI and so on, where you would have to dig deeper to better understand the philosophy and the methodology of the framework. However when we come to Lean it’s as self explanatory as it can get for a powerful methodology that it represents. Kudos also to Toyota for developing and promoting this philosophy in their manufacturing plants to become one of the most popular auto-makers in the world and on top of that keeping it as simple as possible.
Although it comes with certain principles and guidance on where and how can you apply Lean to achieve optimization, you can pretty much apply it to any aspect of the personal or professional lives – How can one be leaner and hence more energetic ? How can one reduce the commute time to work ? Moving on to some business challenges like how can the time to market the product be reduced ? How can the loan approval cycle time be improved (definitely not sub-prime
) ? Which brings us to the current economic conditions where mantras like “More for less”, “Reduce cost”, “Increase productivity”, “Avoid non-critical spending” sound like music to the ears.
Organizations that want to be agile, efficient and productive can turn towards “Lean” to achieve one or more of these goals. At the outset a deeper understanding of the following is absolutely necessary:
1. Is there definite business sense and clearly defined value derived from the services and products offered ?
2. Is there a clear understanding of the value stream – how is the consolidated value created from different parts, people and processes of the organization ?
3. Is there is a clear flow of control and movement across the value stream – who consumes what and produces what in the entire value chain ?
4. Is there enough focus on utilizing the resources efficiently and in a timely manner ? (Did you come across “Just in time” principles for effective resource management)
5. Is there sufficient focus on working efficiently by eliminating any wasteful activities and operating at near perfection levels?
By critically reviewing the above aspects in all areas of the operations and building short term quick wins, medium term and long term programs – organizations will be better prepared to weather this storm. This will also strengthen fundamental operations to embark on more “Value Generating” initiatives in the future.
It makes absolute sense “To Lean” than “Not to Lean” in these challenging times. One of my earlier blogs traced our journey of practically applying Lean to an application monitoring support environment with the objective of removing waste and optimizing the operations support.
