There has been a high level of investment in “business improvement” methodologies over the past 10-20 years have ingrained Lean principles and philosophies into a wide variety of manufacturing organizations. Tools and techniques like “5s” and Kaizen are now commonly seen in day-to-day operations and change situations.

However, adoption of Lean methodologies in the other business sectors and even different business functions within the same organisation is significantly lower. It’s not that Lean principles does not work outside of manufacturing – they do, and quite well. Impressive lean breakthrough programmes have also been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of situations: finance departments, call centres, web development, healthcare, construction...even potato peeling within the food industry!


Lean focus on eliminating waste and minimizing lead times between customer demand and fulfilment. By constantly identifying and removing activities, purchases or resources that aren’t necessary to service delivery, the quality, speed and accuracy of customer service improves.

Across the most common methodologies, there are eight types of waste to target and eliminate:

   •  1. Inventory: Work-in-progress that is stored, therefore not generating value and also incurring cost.
   •  2. Waiting: Work-in-progress that is stalled until the next process step is available.
   •  3. Transportation: Moving goods, service information or customers more than absolutely necessary.
   •  4. Motion: Moving resources (people, equipment) to place where they’re needed.
   •  5. Overproduction: Producing or doing things before they’re actually required.
   •  6. Over-processing: Duplicate or inefficient activities due to poor product and service process design.
   •  7. Quality defects: Identifying, qualifying, and fixing mistakes.
   •  8. Mis-used talent: Producing goods or services that don’t actually meet your customer demands

Sound simple? If it were, then everyone would be doing it well.

But understanding these principles and identifying where the opportunities to improve service performance exist is the first step towards making your operation as lean as possible.

Examples of some tools used in Breakthrough Programmes

Value Stream Mapping
An excellent tool for organisations, value stream maps help analyze the flow of materials and information needed to deliver goods and services to a customer. In a service desk within a department store for example, a map would start with information flows and triggers such as a customer contact and then segments activities that comprise 90% of the work such as returning goods, addressing complaints or fulfilling information requests.

Line Balancing
Line balancing is somewhat easier in a manufacturing environment because availability and flexibility of staff is the key variable. For example, you are able to see when building the product how the components are actually moving through the process and if operators are following a standardized procedure, this can be used to not only reduce waste but also help eliminate other sources of poor service quality.

Kanbans
The Japanese term for “pull scheduling”, Organisations often use kanbans without knowing it and therefore often design and calculate them improperly. For example, instead of waiting for customer orders, a distribution centre could be designed to automatically replenish goods based on consumed/sold goods (communicated electronically or via other triggers). The frequency and volumes of replenishments is calculated using minimum quantities, delivery lead times and demand fluctuation histories. Thus inventory waste is minimized by beginning with the pull of the downstream customer.