When it comes to Lean Management in general, there is a lot of mis-information and mal-practice out there in the world. After all, Lean Management and operational excellence sound good at face value. If it’s been well defined, it will look like “Quality, Delivery, and Cost” – improving quality and tasks being first-time-right, improving delivery times and getting things to customers (and team-mates) faster, and reducing cost. But most companies and leaders don’t even get that far.
Add to this another challenge – that being a manager often involves many parts of a business, not just manufacturing.
These are areas in your business that need Lean Management too – like technology, software or website development, customer service, sales, administration, human resources, quality assurance, projects, training, change programs, communications and much more. They can all benefit from the right approach and start to improve on those Lean Management measures of “Quality, Delivery and Cost”. But it just can’t be done using the old Lean Manufacturing way.
So buyer beware – Lean is traditionally a manufacturing methodology, and few (if any) leaders have gotten it right when applying it to the other important parts of a business – parts that are considered “white collar”.
Every company, even if they are primarily in manufacturing, has these white collar areas to be managed and apply true Lean Management to. Sales have to be made, scheduling has to be done, items have to be handed between departments, customers have to be served.
So how do we adjust this decades-old approach to a white collar world to achieve real success? Simple – we strip the principles of Lean and operational excellence back to their core, to the outcome they are trying to achieve, and take the parts that give us a meaningful result as leaders and applying true Lean Management.
Five Steps to Lean Management for White Collar Work
Before we define Lean Management for white collar work, traditional manufacturing Lean is based on a handful of solid principles, most commonly shown like this:
