Although lean management started in the manufacturing industry, the approach has become a critical tool for success in every sector. It has become popular in higher education, construction, and even the healthcare sector. The lean management methodology, together with its cousins like TQM and Six Sigma, are considered essential pathways to improve results and operations.
And yet, many teams seem not to be aware of the positive effects of the management approach and why it is even relevant in the first place. Although it may be difficult to point out at once, lean management has several benefits.
What is Lean Management?
Lean management involves continuous improvement in the purposes, processes, and people within an organization in order to create value. Whatever is making your company’s profits would be included in this category, including all the production processes and the important stakeholders.
The goal of lean management is to establish processes that can foster a company towards success. The approach also aims to increase the value of operations and products to maximize the organization’s profits.
The basic features of a lean management system are:
- 24/7 access with robust search capabilities
- A platform for improving projects
- Dashboards and data visualization
- Success broadcasting
- Advanced collaboration tools
- Analytics and reporting
- Improvement impact measurement
The Benefits of Lean Management
The top benefits of a lean management approach to every organization are outlined below:
1. Improved Efficiency Due to Centralized Processes
Companies are using spreadsheets to update their data, but this can easily be corrupted and is usually a passive data collection process. Emails are also used as reminders, but they are not as credible. The lean management approach enables every member of the organization to remain updated on the current information and assignments.
The approach provides every person the opportunity to access information at the same time. It also creates a ballpark where improvement would be the central component.
2. Reduced Costs
The lean management approach focuses on maximizing organizational profits. Although the selling price is influenced by different factors, which could include product qualities and the market, companies are able to control the costs through lean processes.
Lean management helps an organization to reduce costs in order to add profits through savings.
3. Better Quality
Lean practices pay attention to every detail. The goal of the process is to decrease any possible defects ad reworks during production. This means that the processes are optimized to minimize any wastage, which eventually saves time that would otherwise be used to remake the products. Reduced mistakes also mean less labor, thus, increasing profit.
Besides, unlike spreadsheets, that only offer information, lean management offers notifications and alerts focused on improving every production process. For example, if certain milestones are missed, the team gets alerted and can follow up on the activities. This improves the overall quality of the end-product.
4. Improved Customer Interaction
One of the key objectives of lean management is to enhance customer satisfaction. The way that customers experience the products or services, communicate with the brand, and respond to any concerns and feedbacks are the major drivers of improving production efficiency.
Through lean management processes, if a company learns that customer surveys are skewed towards a negative direction, the management will be able to pay attention to these concerns. As a result, the process can improve customer satisfaction levels as well as the overall services.
5. Improved Culture
A great impact of lean management is the fact that the staff starts to develop a common language to improve the production process. The team will begin to discuss the progress of the company in a manner that will push success.
The shared experiences will also speed up every process, thus, cementing the lean practices. Furthermore, with a new way of thinking, the staff will be open to improvements and find ways to consistently makes significant changes. As a result, lean management creates a culture that focuses on improvement.
6. Boosts Morale
Lean management favors information sharing and regular communication between managers and team members.
This means that the whole team can talk freely about their work and the production practices, thus, enhancing empowerment for better decision making. And when a team knows their purposes, they will be willing to improve the quality of every process.
Conclusion
In every organization, lean management is a great thing for everyone. While the management team is able to reduce waste while maximizing the profits, team members can create a sharing culture and gain morale.
With lean methodologies, a company is already leading in different fields. Visit We Are Lean and Agile website to learn more about lean management.
