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Lean Management Techniques

In Business

In this post I want to take a brief look at lean management techniques and how they can be applied in your business environment. Most people have heard of ‘Lean Management’, but does everyone know what it means? Many people I have discussed this subject with think it has a lot to do with recycling and climate change. And in a way they would not be wrong as they are recycling their materials and not wasting them. However, there is a lot more to lean management techniques than meets the eye. Lean management focuses on continuously refining work processes, purposes, and people to fully eliminate waste.

Target Driven

Many manufacturing companies have targets of how fast they can process something, whether this is a production line or a service. By doing this, they believe they can cut time waste in half. Many of these employers offer financial incentives for doing so, and many just want to keep their jobs, therefore must adhere to the rules. This type of environment can put a lot of pressure onto team members to beat their competition. Whilst striving to beat their competitors, which are also their team members, they may find it easier to allow a few inaccuracies through instead of wasting time sounding the bell to stop production and allowing their opponents to win. This is not an example of lean management techniques in the workplace, nor is it an example of effective teamwork either. So, what is a good example of lean management techniques? For this, we would need to travel back in time to the late 1940s and to a well-known Japanese car manufacturing company.

Toyota

Toyota founder Sakichi Toyoda, along with his son Kiichiro Toyoda and chief Toyota engineer Taiichi Ohno, developed a manufacturing process called TPS. TPS stands for Toyota Production System with a view to ridding its factories of ‘Muda’ which in English translates to ‘waste’. TPS is more commonly known as Lean Management and has become one of the most popular (and more commonly strived for) ways of working in most businesses. So, what are the three core areas that need to be focussed on?

3 Core Areas of Lean Management

There are three core areas of lean management. According to Routledge Tayor & Francis Group. (2021) Lean Management focuses on these three principal areas:

  1. Defining value from the customers viewpoint
  2. Eliminating all waste within the business
  3. Continuously improve all work processes (this includes people and purposes)

Toyota successfully developed five key principles that must be adhered to meet these three core areas of lean management.

5 Principles

These five principles of lean management techniques are:

  1. Specify what creates value for customers
  2. Identify steps to achieve along the process chain
  3. Make the processes flow by eliminating waste
  4. Respond to customer demand
  5. Strive for perfection by continual improvement

To achieve the goals needed to meet the core areas and the principles, Toyota implement the Jidoka method, more commonly known in this country as the Just-In-Time system which combines the “automation with a human touch” as pictured in the diagram below.

Toyota. (undated).

The Just-In Time Method

The Just-In-Time method makes “…only what is needed, when it is needed, and in the amount needed.” Adhering to this principle promotes the eradication of waste of all kinds. An example of this way of working is highlighted below at the Toyota Kentucky production line. The staff are trained to recognise when there is a fault in production and stop the line. They pull a cord and alert everyone that production must be stopped, and all members of the team must congregate together to examine the problem. The problem is resolved either with the help of the team members or by a power further up the hierarchy, then improvements are incorporated into the standard workflow. Team members must be able to rely on each other, feel comfortable to discuss things openly, and accountable for their own actions, for this method to work. Therefore, it is extremely important to have an effective team in place from the beginning.

 

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