Continuous Improvement in Lean Thinking

Continuous Improvement Article

"A lean organisation understands what constitutes true customer value and focuses on managing and refining its key processes to continuously improve the value it provides."

This quote is take from an article (PDF) written in 2010 for Law Business Review.

It was at a time when law firms were exploring Lean and had little experience of it.
The insights are applicable to any business in any sector.

The article also explored the 5 principles.

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5 Core Principles of Lean Management

The five core management principles of lean thinking consists

1. Only customers can place a value on the solutions (products/services) an organisation provides.
2. Companies should understand every activity in the processes they use and whether these add value to the customer – aiming to remove those activities and processes that don’t add value or are part of the “seven wastes”.
3. Businesses should organise around the solutions valued by the customers – breaking through the functional and departmental barriers to create flow.
4. Every process should only be operated when required (“pulled”) by the customer, not (“pushed”) when the company desires or targets dictate.
5. An organisation should strive to continuously improve and refine the value its solutions deliver to its customer.

And the identification of the “seven wastes” that occur throughout organisations.

This article explores how the customer value  is integral to continuous improvement and how most business performance problems aren’t caused by lack of effort or poor intent.

They’re caused by a lack of clarity around customer requirements, capacity, delivery and flow.

Caused by a lack of understanding how factories have to align with what the customers value, how the factory then has to work. Whether the business is Make to Order, Design to Order, Make to Stock and how this affects stocks, training, planning, procurement, strategy.

That’s why my work with manufacturing businesses starts with a Factory Performance Diagnostic Review, before Lean programmes, coaching or hands-on leadership support.

This allows improvement activity to focus on the issues that genuinely affect

• capacity
• delivery performance
• cash flow 
• growth and ultimately the customer value.

Explore the Factory Performance Diagnostic Review on this page