Framework library · Operations and resilience

Lean

Lean treats everything the customer would not pay for as waste: waiting, rework, moving things about, making more than is needed. The method is to watch the work as it is actually done, name each waste where it occurs and remove its cause, so that the same people deliver more, sooner.

LevelFoundational
TimeHalf a day watching the work, then an hour a week working through the register
Who to involveThe people who do the work, their team leader, and someone from outside the team who will ask why each step is there.
Also calledlean manufacturing, lean production, lean thinking, Toyota Production System, TIMWOODS, eight wastes

Use it when

  • Customers wait far longer than the work itself takes, such as a home fibre installation booked three weeks out that needs two hours on site.
  • A team is busy all day yet its output is flat, and nobody can say where the time goes.
  • You are about to add people or systems to a process and want to remove the waste first, so you do not pay to scale it.
  • Field, warehouse or provisioning work repeats the same steps many times a week, so small gains add up.

Avoid it when

  • The process fails because of variation in quality rather than waste in the flow. Use Six Sigma DMAIC to find and reduce the variation.
  • One step limits the output of the whole system. Find and work that step first with the theory of constraints. Removing waste elsewhere will not raise output.
  • The work is one-off, such as a single network build or a merger. Lean pays back on repeated work. Manage the rest as a project.
  • Lean is being used to justify cutting jobs. People stop showing you waste once it costs them their jobs, so agree how freed time will be used before you start.

How to run it

  1. Define value from the customer's side

    Write what the customer is paying for in one line, such as "a working connection at the time we promised". Anything that does not move the work towards it is a candidate for waste.

  2. Watch the work where it happens

    Go to the depot, the van, the order desk. Follow one job from start to finish and record what you see, not what the process document says.

  3. Name each waste by type

    Transport, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, overprocessing, defects and unused skills (TIMWOODS). Record each observation against the step where it happens.

  4. Score how often and how much

    Frequency times impact gives a priority from 1 to 25. The chart adds the scores by type of waste, which usually shows one or two types carrying most of the cost.

  5. Fix the cause, then trial the fix

    A countermeasure removes the reason for the waste (kit the van the night before), not the symptom (tell engineers to hurry). Trial it with one team, measure the result, then make it the standard.

  6. Move on to flow and pull

    Once the worst waste is gone, work so that jobs move without stopping and each step starts only when the next one is ready for it.

Work through it

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Mistakes to avoid

  • Recording waste without a countermeasure or an owner. The register becomes a list of complaints. The workbench flags any line without a countermeasure.
  • Blaming people for waste the system creates. Most waiting and rework comes from scheduling and handoffs, not from effort.
  • Removing inventory before the flow is stable. Stock often hides unreliable supply. Take it out gradually and watch for shortages.
  • Running a single improvement week and declaring victory. Without standard work and a review rhythm the old way returns within months.

Where it comes from

Developed at Toyota from the 1930s, and more intensely after the Second World War, by Kiichiro Toyoda, Taiichi Ohno and others, and described in Ohno's Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production (1978 in Japanese; English 1988). John Krafcik named it lean production in "Triumph of the Lean Production System", Sloan Management Review, Fall 1988. James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones and Daniel Roos described it in The Machine That Changed the World (1990), and Womack and Jones reduced it to five principles in Lean Thinking (1996). Source.

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