Lean: The current buzzword of the public sector

What is Lean?

There are many definitions of Lean. Like many fashionable terms, it has been highjacked by vested interests to promote their particular version of the methodology.

In general, therefore, Lean is a set of techniques intended to assist people to identify and remove wasteful activity from a production (or service) process. The overarching principle is very simple, eliminate “non-value adding” activity / waste, so that what you are left with is a production (or service) process that achieves what the customer wants at minimal overall cost.

Applying the principle to a real-world production (or service) process is a little more difficult in practice. Several broad reasons for this include:

• there may be limited understanding of customer value, and therefore difficulty in identifying “non-value adding” activity
• some forms of non-value adding activity or waste are difficult to find (e.g. not visible, for example time delays)
• management “good-practice” appears to conflict with the principles of Lean, for example progress/status reporting which can be assessed as “non-value adding”
• there are huge amounts of confusion about Lean terminology, techniques and methods often prompted by suppliers with vested interests

What does Lean achieve?

Successful application of Lean principles results in quicker, simpler and (therefore) cheaper production or service processes. Lean can result in fundamental redesign of the way organisations operate, or it can be the basis for small scale incremental improvement.

Lean versus Business Process Improvement

The outcomes possible with Lean are not unique. Similar production or service improvement can be achieved using Business Process Improvement or Redesign (BPI or BPR) techniques – which may not be materially different during the redesign phase.

One key aspect of Lean techniques is the link with Six Sigma. Six Sigma is a statistical methodology intended to improve repeatable production /business processes by the removal of defects. It is focussed on the quality of value-adding steps, and is most appropriate to processes where there is limited scope for planned variability of the outcome(s) from the business process.

Our Lean Services

All our work in improving business processes over the last decade has been underpinned by the use of Lean principles. We believe that Lean principles and techniques have a significant role to play in process and service improvement projects. (One of our notable successes included the elimination of over 400,000 “non-value adding” incoming telephone calls per annum through redesign of a business process.)

However, for (typically) complex and highly variable service delivery processes it is usually necessary to adopt a broader approach to improvement, including, for example, gathering a detailed understanding of causes of demand and the constraints associated with existing or available systems.

Please contact us, we would be happy to discuss your requirements.