| About Lean and Its Significance... |
| Lean is a Hands On, break through, business improvement tool, used to
remove the operational and systemic ‘wastes’ and ‘non- value adding activities’
from the business system thereby optimizing the system to produce the optimum
quantity with the optimum amount of resources, exactly at the time when your
customer needs the product / service. Lean as a methodology, provides you quite
a few practical tools to achieve this by removing the waste from the system,
creating the flow and then optimizing the operational parameters. |
| The Concept of Lean revolves around delivering a product or service to a customer
to 'TAKT' which means rhythm. The entire chain of activities involved in this delivery is
tuned to produce to this rhythm so that there is no mismatch between the customer requirement
and the delivery of the supplier. Establishing the TAKT will look a pretty easy job, if you
have the right information. But once established, it will definitely expose the bottle necks
in the whole value chain and a Lean practitioner or a company embarking on to a Lean journey
is expected to remove them (or reduce it to the lowest extent possible as an immediate step)
at the earliest possible. |
| Classical LEAN has categorized systemic wastes into seven, Namely Transportation, Inventory,
Motion, Waiting, Over Production, Over Processing and Defects. Lean helps you in identifying these
wastes and to eliminate them in a practical yet systematic and simple manner. |
| Lean also clearly defines Valued added and Non valued added activities and helps you in
identifying both streams in your business enterprise. Lean also provides you practical tools
and vision towards eliminating or minimizing these Non value added activities. |
| The significance of Lean Principles in 21st century business environment: |
| In today’s global market, which is a buyer’s market, no company can claim a monopoly on any
market or product. The key word is Value for money. The times are gone where price tags used to
be key decision point in a buying decision. Thanks to the revolution in the filed of communication
customers from all walks of life are informed about various products and services and more over
about the options available along and with in those products and services . This makes Companies
to compete to reinvent the value that they provide for the customer’s money, continuously. This
has created a two pronged thought process in every business owner irrespective of whether you are
into manufacturing or service. It is all about providing better quality at a reduced price, where
by your value for money equation stands prominent. This also prompts the business owners to look
inward into their own business system and reduce the internal cost to save some money. |
| Lean Provides unprecedented opportunities to reduce your internal cost by identifying and removing
the various wastes and Non Vale added activities in the whole value chain. Through the same initiative
it helps you in improving the quality of your product / service by optimizing your processes and cleaning
the whole system. By reducing the inventory load on the system the amount of money freed up in terms of
working capital and the amount of money saved in terms of storage, demurrage, insurance and allied costs
comes as an added advantage for futuristic investments. In nutshell what LEAN does is remove waste, create
flow and link you directly to you customer and then link your supply chain to your shop. |
