What is Lean?
Lean thinking is a mindset – a way of viewing the world. Lean is about focus, removing waste, and increasing customer value Establishing value allows organizations to create a top-down target price. The cost to produce the products and services is then determined. The organization focuses on eliminating waste so that they can deliver the value the customer expects at the highest level of profitability.
Lean is about smooth process flows, doing only those activities that add customer value and eliminating all other activities that don’t. If it doesn’t add value then it must add cost.
Lean manufacturing is a methodology that focuses on minimizing waste within manufacturing systems while simultaneously maximizing productivity.
Lean approach
Also known as lean production, or just lean, the integrated sociotechnical approach is based on the Toyota Production System.
Find most used Lean tools: Kaizen, 5S, SMED, Root Cause Analysis, Kanban, Value Stream Mapping, PDCA, from a big toolbox that you can use as needed to reduce waste.
Continuous Improvement as a way of living
Continuous improvement, also called continual improvement, based on the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle is the ongoing improvement of products, services or processes. Continuous improvement can be implemented by using incremental or breakthrough improvements. These can be applied interchangeably, but the best way to deploy a thorough continuous improvement program is to combine both. By doing this you can deal with quick wins while giving complex and larger projects the time and attention required.
There are a wide variety of continuous improvement methods and methodologies that can be used to achieve the best results such as Lean , Lean, Innovation, Total Quality Management. All that is required is to select or combine those and their tools and the rest is magic.
The benefits of continuous improvement as way of living is to make your company constantly better by improving your practices to make your team and business more efficient, accurate, and effective.
There will always be room to improve your processes and methods!
Lean and Data Driven Decision-Making
Data-driven decision making (DDDM) is an approach to business governance that values decisions that can be backed up with verifiable data rather than making decisions that are intuitive or based on observation alone, supporting competitive advantage.
The success of the data-driven approach is reliant upon the quality of the data gathered and the effectiveness of its analysis and interpretation.
Business intelligence tools are a strong resource to analyze the data and allow easy dashboards customization to display the important information in real time. The changes in how data can be mined and visualized allows business executives who have no technology backgrounds to be able to work with analytics tools and make data-driven decisions.
