Lean Management Thinking @ Starbucks

Lean Management Thinking @ Starbucks

In case you missed it Starbucks claimed Lean Management Thinking was behind a tripling of profits and a dramatic surge in customer satisfaction in recent weeks. What exactly did they do?

According to this Lean Japanese Techniques story in The Wall Street Journal, they

  • Saved between 20 and 33% of the processing time
    Lean Management Thinking @ Starbucks

    Lean Management Thinking @ Starbucks

    in making coffee, which meant customers get a faster service

  • Used some of the time saved to engage with customers, driving customer satisfaction from 56 to 76%, in the branch cited.
  • Re-engineered deliveries to the stores to cut down on the 40 or so trips some staff had to make back and forth with early morning deliveries
  • Stopped making large batches of coffee grinds in the morning and now make batches every 8 minutes to keep the grinds fresh and the aroma wafting through the store. All adding to the customer experience.
  • Used 5S techniques of layout and colour coding to ensure everything is to hand.

Showing you don’t have to cut go out and just costs with Lean Management Thinking, you can use the time you free up to engage with customers and other techniques can be employed to ensure customers can get what they want.

Cheers

Mark

(this post originally appeared on our theleanmanager blog on 5th March 2010 and was re-published here in 2020)

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