Characteristics of a Lean Company

While Lean can be beneficially applied to any process within an organization, its greatest benefit comes when it is applied across the enterprise. In The Machine That Changed the World in 1990, Jim Womack, et al., emphasized “that lean thinking can be applied by any company anywhere in the world, but the full power of the system is only realized when it is applied to everyone.” the elements of the company.

Over time, an organization that implements Lean can be said to become a Lean Company. While there is no precise definition of a Lean Enterprise, I believe those organizations share common characteristics. A Lean company can be defined by these 15 characteristics:

1. Customer focus – The external client is both the point of departure and the point of arrival. Maximize value for the customer. Optimize not around internal operations, but around the customer. Seek to understand not only the customer’s requirements, but also their expectations for quality, delivery, and price.
2. Goal – An organization’s purpose encompasses its vision (where it wants to go), its mission (what it does), and its strategies (how it does it). Focus on the purpose, not the tools.
3. Organizational Alignment – You want people to understand your purpose, not just your job description or the tasks assigned to them. All people involved must have a common understanding of the organization’s purpose and a working understanding of the consequences of failure and the benefits of success.
4. Knowledge – People are the engine of the company, so it is vital to build knowledge and share it. This includes explicit knowledge (such as from books) as well as tacit knowledge, which involves soft skills. Knowledge is built through the scientific method of PDCA.
5. Interrogation- Foster a culture of questioning. Ask why several times to try to get to the root of the problem. Encourage everyone to question. “Seek first to understand, then to be understood,” said Stephen Covey.
6. Modesty- The more you strive for Lean, the more you realize how little you know and how much remains to be learned. Learning begins with humility.
7. Confidence- Build confidence in your promises and commitments. Building trust takes time.
8. Empowered Employees – Give frontline employees the first opportunity to resolve issues. All employees must share the responsibility for success and failure.
9. flexible workforce As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said: “The only constant is change.” Flexibility is the ability to react to changes in customer demand. The key to success is maintaining redundancy and therefore flexibility within the core competency.
10. camaraderie – Use teams, not individuals, internally across functions and externally with vendors. Employees are partners too. As Covey says: “You have to find a win-win solution, never a lose-lose solution, and if you can’t, you have to walk away.”
11. Simplicity- Lean is not simple, but simplicity pervades everything. Simplicity is better achieved by avoiding complexity than by exercises in “rationalization.”
12. Process – Organize and think by end-to-end process. Think horizontally, not vertically. Focus on the way the product moves, not the way the machines, people or customers move.
13. Gets better- Continuous improvement is everyone’s business. The improvement must go beyond incremental waste reduction to include breakthrough innovation.
14. Prevention – Seek to prevent problems and waste, rather than inspect and fix. Shift the emphasis from failure and evaluation to prevention. Inspecting the process, not the product, is prevention. Use poka yoke to correct process errors.
15. display – Visual elements translate the performance of each process into expected versus actual, through management systems. It is based on regular, frequent and factual data. Imaging provides an opportunity to quickly detect and take action at the earliest moment when performance has fallen short of expectations.

A Lean company is not created quickly. When a company applies lean thinking, culture and methods throughout the organization and beyond its four walls to customers and suppliers, a Lean company is formed.