Find a change agent who wants to get the knowledge to apply lean thinking and lead the transformation. Map the entire value stream for each product and find a lever for change by seizing an existing crisis (or creating one) to help everyone take steps to adopt lean thinking and create a lean organisation. Forget grand strategy for the moment, create a sense of urgency and begin asap with an important and visible activity that's performing poorly. Just get started, demand immediate results to build momentum for change quickly, and when you've got momentum, expand the scope to link and improve other activities in the value stream.
Create an organisation that channels product streams
Reorganise by product streams containing dedicated people and functions so that value flows smoothly to the customer. When batch-and-queue activities are converted to lean techniques less people produce more product so deal with excess people at the outset. Devise a growth strategy to put those people who have been freed up to use elsewhere and remove the anchor-draggers - those who won't give new ideas a chance. When you've fixed something, fix it again. Instill the principle of continuous improvement in everyone and create a permanent lean promotion team to take the lead in planning successive improvements across the organisation. 2 steps forward and 1 step back is ok. No steps forward is not ok.
Install business systems to encourage lean thinking
To make the lean approach self-sustaining utilise policy deployment to facilitate organisation-wide agreement on the lean tasks to be completed each year and create a lean accounting system, which causes product streams to always do the right thing by indicating whether efforts are adding more cost than value or vice-versa. Make everything transparent so that the rate of improvement can be measured and everyone can see what is happening in a product stream all of the time, teach lean thinking and skills to everyone so that everyone is thinking about the total flow of value, and pay people in relation to the performance of the organisation. Batch-and-queue thinking sees large, fast, elaborate, dedicated, and centralised tools being most efficient. Right-size the tools - processes, information management systems, organisational units, etc - to ensure products flow smoothly through the stream without delays and allow the product stream to respond quickly to serve new business needs.
Complete the transformation
Convert from top-down leadership to bottom-up initiatives to generate automatic and prevalent lean thinking. Develop a lean global strategy and convince suppliers and customers to take the above steps to enable the creation of value to occur closer to the customer.
Previous Topic
