A Comprehensive Guide To Lean Philosophy For Businesses

The philosophy of Lean applies to every area of business and every industry, regardless of size. Lean principles are increasingly used throughout the country to revolutionize businesses and subsequently improve efficiency and productivity levels.

The principle of Lean business management was created by Taiichi Ohno for Toyota and is also known as the Toyota Production System. Here, for your information, is a comprehensive guide to Lean philosophy for businesses.

Lean Consulting

Essentially, the philosophy of ‘lean’ can be applied to all areas of your business, and simply put the idea is to create a higher level of value for customers whilst simultaneously minimizing the number of resources and materials your business uses.

Lean consulting services will significantly help your business, regardless of size or industry, achieve significant performance improvements by identifying, prioritizing, and then improving the most critical aspects of your operations. Depending on the company you choose, the practical application of the Lean philosophy will understandably vary, however, each consultancy business tends to follow a similar, five-step process when applying the lean tools and techniques to a business.

• Understanding the Current State of Your Business
• Identifying all Steps in Your Business that Fail to Add Value
• Determining How to Eliminate Those Steps
• Creating the Future State of Your Business
• Building a Sustainment Plan for Your Improved Business to Move Forward

Benefits of Lean Management

There are a plethora of amazing benefits to applying the principles of Lean management to your business model.

One of the main advantages is a significant reduction in the costs associated with the day-to-day running of your business. As Lean business management centers around the goal of reducing all manner of waste, it is also centered around maximizing and sustaining the maximization of a company’s profits. There are always ways for a business to reduce their production costs that have been overlooked at each stage of a businesses’ development and Lean management will identify, target, and eradicate such unnecessary expenditure.

Almost 50% of companies undertaking cost reduction initiatives fail to meet their cost reduction targets.

Lean management also significantly improves the level and quality of customer and client interactions and communications as it heavily focuses on the point of view of the customer rather than the business as a whole. Wasteful practices such as needless meetings where nothing is ever decided and a delay in responding to individual employee concerns and issues are eradicated, resulting in a heightened level of satisfaction amongst your workforce.

Lean management focuses on the details, some of which will inevitably up until now have been largely overlooked and will automatically ‘iron out’ issues and problems along the chain of production that is costly and wholly unnecessary.

Other benefits of the Lean philosophy include a substantial increase in your employee’s morale and motivation, the encouragement of individuals to aspire to progress, an increase in the quality of the products provided, and valuable time being saved that can be redirected to areas of the business that require more time devoted to them.

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