Business Excellence Consortium

Lean

Lean is a continuous improvement strategy used by organizations to achieve world-class performance. The best way to define the Lean methodology is describe the characteristics of an organization on the world-class journey.

These organizations will strive to:

• Improve quality, safety and productivity
• Eliminate waste in all business processes by focusing on value-added activities and customer satisfaction
• Reduce delays, lead-times, inventories and costs
• Create an empowered workforce
• Capitalize on effective teamwork
• Foster a continuous improvement culture

What can Lean implementation really do for your organization?

Implementing Lean tools can help your organization:

• Uncover wasteful activities
• Reduce your delivery times and costs
• Learn how to use teams effectively and tap into the organization's discretionary energy
• Open the lines of communication from all areas of the company to the CEO
• Increase cooperation and participation from all employees
• Support value-added activities that customers are willing to pay for which will result in increased customer satisfaction, profits and jobs.
• Will help facilitate listening to the voice of the customer
• Facilitates win/win/win conditions between suppliers, goods & service producers, and customers (enterprise value chain)

Typical Lean Implementation Results:

• Quality improvements - from % to (PPM) Parts Per Million - From 5% (50,000 PPM) to 0.01% (100 PPM or <)
• Productivity improvements - 25% to 50%
• Inventory reductions - 75%
• Reduction in floor space - 30% to 50%
• Setup time reduction - 70% to 90%
• On-time Deliveries - 99%
• Lead time reduction - 75%
• Toyota typically sees 100,000 improvements per 1,000 employees per year
• At Toyota, human resources no longer needed in improved processes are re-invested into other kaizen team. (People feel valued and they feel safe)

The BEC helps organizations to identify where their greatest opportunities are and how to implement Lean in a way that provides the greatest leverage for process improvements which result in an annuity effect.