Lean thinking is a type of business methodology that is designed to provide a way to think about how to organize the human activities for delivering more profits to the society and worth to the individuals in the elimination of waste. The main motive of lean thinking is to form a lean enterprise that will sustain growth by supporting customer satisfaction along with employee satisfaction. This serves innovative products or services profitably by reducing the needless costs to customers, suppliers and the environment. Lean thinking helps the individuals in identifying the wasted time and efforts on their job and even better way to work together for improving the processes by eliminating these wastes. Through this, the enterprise will be able to deliver more results at lesser expenses while developing the employee's confidence, competence and the ability to work with the others.
5 principles that will include your workplace efficiency are:
Defining Value:
For understanding the first principle you have to understand what value is. Value is nothing but the amount the customer is ready to pay for. It is vital to find out the actual need of the customers. sometimes it may happen the customer may not know what they are looking for. This takes place especially when it comes to novel products and technologies. There are many procedures to find out what the customer is looking for through interviews, surveys, demographic information, and web analytics. By making use of these qualitative and quantitative techniques you will be able to discover what is the need of the customer and what the customers want and how they want the products or services to get delivered and the price they proposed.
Map the value streams:
The second important principle is identifying and mapping the Value stream. Here, the aim is to make use of the customer’s value as a reference point and identifying the activities which contribute to these values. Those products that do not add value to the end customers are considered waste. These wastes are broken down into two groups: one is the non-value added but necessary and the other non-value added but unnecessary. The former needs to be reduced as much as possible but the latter is a complete waste and should be deleted. By eliminating the unnecessary waste processes or steps you will be able to make sure that the customers are getting exactly what they want and the cost of producing the product and services also reduces.
Creating flow:
Well, after the removal of the wastes from the value streams following actions are taken to make sure that the flow of the remaining steps runs smoothly without any interruption or delays. Some of the strategies for value-adding activities flow effortlessly involves breaking down steps, leveling out the workload, reconfiguring the production steps, forming the cross-functional departments and coaching the employees to be multi-skilled and adaptive.
Create Pull:
The main aim of the pull-based system is limiting the inventory as well as work in process items that ensure that the requisite materials and information are all available for the smoother flow of work. On the other hand, a pull-based system helps in on-time delivery and manufacture where the products are created on time which is needed and in quantities required. The pull-based system is crafted out of the need of the end customers. By following the value streams, you will make sure that the product which is produced will be able to meet the demands of the customers.
Pursuing Perfection:
By following the first four steps you will be able to prevent wastes. Last but not the least Pursuing perfection is one of the important steps among all the other. Moreover, it makes the lean thinking and continuous process as a part of the organizational culture. Every employee needs to strive towards perfection while delivering the products that are based on the need of the customer. Thus, the company must be a learning organization and should always seek something better every day.
Conclusion:
With the introduction of the Agile methodology, there is a drastic change in the work process. Lean thinking helps the organization in its growth by removing waste. Lean helps the manager by finding out the inefficiencies and delivering the best value to the customers. Thus, this helps in forming an efficient and effective organization. Moreover, the principles help in crafting the proper flow of work process as well as developing improvement in the culture.
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