Operational Excellence
What is Lean? You’ve heard a lot about this term as a “divine remedy” for outstanding success and improvement. Today, let’s learn about what Lean is, what are the benefits and the first basic steps when applying lean to your business!
Lean is a way of doing and thinking to maximize the value for customers. Eliminate waste, continually improve the entire business by everyone, anytime, and anywhere.
Simply, Lean provides a systematic and optimized method. The method helps to create more value, productivity, quality with less resources.
A business or a factory that applies Lean will receive tremendous benefits including:
– Outstanding product and service quality.
– Productivity increases significantly due to eliminating all waste.
– Turnover is shortened by reducing the Lead Time.
– Cost optimization.
– Customer satisfaction.
– The team has improved knowledge, capacity and fast respond to market demand.
Lean in Lean manufacturing with groundbreaking and sustainable results, has gradually been applied throughout business areas. Typical such as: Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Human Resources, Production, Accounting, Business … The binding, close connection between related departments helps to build a cohesive enterprise, is a unified and together focus on the development.
The essence of Lean is to focus on reducing and maximizing the value created for customers through eliminating all unnecessary waste and unnecessary activities.
For example: When going to a doctor, the actual time creates value, bringing the results to be wrapped up in 5-10 minutes of medical examination and screening by doctors … But we have to take up to half a day / day, just to wait, to number, to wait for test results …. How good would our life be without those waiting and wasting?
The answer will surprise you. Currently, Lean is a very popular method in the world because it is easy to start, easy to do, simple. Everyone can do it and get involved.
Lean has diversified applications in many different fields: retail, manufacturing, food, electronics, hospitals, administration, services … Combining many variants: Lean Start-up, Lean Health care hospital, Lean Manufacturing, Lean Service.
Depending on the level and current situation of the enterprise (whether Lean has been implemented yet), there will be different levels of preparation and implementation. If you start from the beginning, you can apply some simple Lean tools like 8 wasteful types, 5S, Kaizen – small improvement projects. This helps to continuously improve productivity and quality. From there, the team gets used to regular improvement, recognizes the type of waste in the operation process and thoroughly solves the problem.
Before working on an improvement project, you need to focus on the project area: quality / service / packaging / product … to ensure that you do not lose a lot of resources. The creation of an improvement team consists of relevant departments to investigate, investigate, identify, tear down the problem and solve it at its root.
The ability of employees or advisors to detect and eliminate waste is extremely important during Lean implementation.
I recommend that CEO and managers when embarking on a Lean transformation should think about three basic business issues:
What difficulties will you encounter when deploying lean?
With experience in implementing Lean in many different companies, Duc realized the biggest difficulty was how to maintain innovation. Can not improve once is done, must do many rounds. Is each round of testing the solution good? Then review the adjustment to make it more and more suitable, go deep and appropriate for your business
The second difficulty is that you need the cooperation and effort of all employees. We often overlook the explanation and ideological information for the team, so when improvement should call people directly in the relevant department to join. Because they are knowledgeable about the job, and can contribute very practical and useful perspectives.
In addition, for sustainable improvement results, we need to be determined to do and monitor the implementation for at least 3-6 months to ensure that the new way has become a habit and a culture.
Applying Lean successfully, the enterprise will transform into a completely different company with multiple competitiveness:
Some examples of companies that have adopted Lean and dominated the market for decades, without rivals: Toyota (Car), Boeing (aviation), Samsung (Electronics), Amazon (Supply Chain) , Nike (sporting goods).
If you want your business to achieve the same achievements as the above brands, don’t be afraid to change the way you operate with LEAN! Learn other articles about LEAN on opexvn.com/en to accumulate knowledge before applying to your business. Or contact OPEX to get private advice on the problem you are having.
It is no coincidence that lean is the most popular management method of the modern world. Begin the first step by learning, learning and developing yourself. Don’t miss out on great opportunities and a life worth living! Change yourself and then change your business to the success you dream of.
OPEX Consulting – Operational Excellence Your Business
Great content! Super high-quality! Keep it up! 🙂