Misunderstandings about Lean

Although Lean has time & again proven to be very beneficial to the business organizations, still Lean has failed also in many organizations which has given rise to certain misconceptions about Lean which makes many companies hesitant in adopting it wholeheartedly.

• Lean means only "Cost Cutting" in the business processes. Instead Lean focuses on eliminating all kinds of waste in the operational processes & give more value to the customers.
• Lean means increasing the productivity of workers & getting rid of the excess manpower present in the organization. In reality, lean emphasizes on multi-skilling of workers to redeploy them in other areas & processes in the organization, wherever required.
• Lean is successful only in manufacturing organizations. Lean has been successfully implemented in many industries & domains like healthcare, services, food, financial services, banking, IT, government administration, supply chain, etc.
• Lean involves only implementing 5S & Visual Boards. Lean comprises of many tools & techniques like kanban, kaizen, TPM, Heijunka, jidoka, etc. But most importantly, lean creates a culture of improvement in the entire organization.  
• Lean implementation is expensive & hence, can be done only by large organizations. In fact, lean has got nothing to do with size & can be successfully implemented even in very small organizations
• Just maintaining 5S housekeeping activities is enough to sustain lean in the organization. Lean creates a culture of improvement in the entire organization where people & processes thrive on continuously improving on their past achievements.
• Lean implementation should be done during the "Lean season" or during the economic recession as it can cause serious disruptions in the production processes, negatively affecting the entire organization. This is incorrect as implementing lean during the peak season will in fact bring more improvements.
• Lean is only suitable for automotive industry as it was defined by a car manufacturing company Toyota. Lean has been successfully implemented in many industries & domains.
• Lean implementation is very slow & it can take years to show benefits. Although full Lean implementation can take some time but its incorrect that gains come only after a long time. In fact, gains & benefits are immediately visible as soon as the waste present in the operational processes begin to disappear.

 Hence, in a nutshell, we can say that Lean has brought tremendous benefits to many organizations & wherever it has failed, it has got more to do with the people doing it incorrectly & the wrong methods being used by them.