Starting the Lean Journey for Small Businesses - Part 1

Lean has been in the talk for quite a while now , Many top executives from large corporates proudly announce that they are on the way to operational excellence or they have already started their "Lean journey". Although there are many fake lean stories around us , the origin of Lean or the TPS ( Toyota Production System ) still proves to be the most successful business philosophy towards operational excellence. All these being said , The small businesses across the world are still finding it difficult to get the grasp of Lean thinking , mostly because of the lack of access to the right kind of people or the resources needed to start their transformation, but how can them address this gap ?

Understanding the Lean philosophy : Many small business owners , especially from those who are not from the manufacturing background , are still new to the term 'Lean' or have misunderstood it has something to do only with manufacturing or automobile industry . In fact, Lean Management is a business philosophy which can be applied to any business or any industry of any size. It enables you to think from the customer perspective and how as a business you are adding value to him . It also makes you think about the "wastes" that you may have in your entire business processes which is adding cost without adding any value to the customer. To understand Lean correctly is the most crucial and primary step that you should take as a business owner , if you wish to transform the way you do the business !

Also , if you wish to read on Lean or TPS ( Toyota Production System ) , here is a list of books that you can start on :

1. 1.?The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer. by Jeffrey Liker
2. ?The Machine that Changed the World by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones
3. ?The Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production by Taiichi Ohno
4. ?Gemba Kaizen by Masaaki Imai
5. How to Implement Lean Manufacturing - By Lonnie Wilson ( Available on google books)

Understand your organisational maturity : As I have pointed out in my previous article , every change must be done with the right amount of capabilities in your organisation , or its not going to deliver the expected results . Lean is a completely different thinking process that needs to be practiced from the top to bottom levels of the business. It is very important to understand if your organisation is capable to absorb this change or not . How do you know that ? Well, its not easy , but the easiest way is to look at how your people are solving the daily business problems . Is it a fire fighting approach ? Are they really capable of thinking and solving the problems by analysing the root causes ? If not, can you train them on Lean thinking ?

Another way is to look at your current management systems and the digital infrastructure of your business. Many business owners have made big investments in building automated processes and are still struggling to deliver good customer experiences . A lot many small businesses doesn't even have a good management system or governance systems in place . This makes them highly Un organised and vulnerable to any small problems that may occur in their daily operations. Therefore , It's better to develop a small capability matrix which will give you a wholistic picture of where you are as an organisation right now. Here is a small example of how you can have a high level mapping of different capabilities of your current organisational scenario.

Making the Lean Road Map : A perfect capability matrix would give you the basic understanding of where and how to start your lean journey. Although a complete Lean transformation would take years to complete , you could really benefit from the early changes that can be done more easily. One such thing is to have an organised workplace which goes by the term 5s ( Five S ) , Each 'S' stands for S- Sort , S-Set , S-Shine, S- Standardise & S-Sustain. A disciplined and structured step by step approach to have a clean and organised workplace which is safe , productive and delivers high quality products / services . Remember, even these changes can be hard to sustain if you don't have a dedicated leadership level commitment and a trained workforce . Also , if you fail here , meaning if you can't implement the 5s system , you are most probably not going to make the Lean transformation!

The first step that you should be considering in your Lean road map is to improve your people capability . You should start by asking the question "How do you make yourself and your people capable for Lean transformation ? "

Making a Lean road map with timelines and action plans is going to be a time taking effort which may require updates and changes on the go. However, the first and foremost challenge that you should be addressing here is the people capability problem . You should start by asking the question "how to make your team and yourself capable for Lean transformation" ? Once you figure out how much time you may need to train your existing workforce to embrace and sustain the first step of change , the rest is going to be much easier . There are much more things to be considered and done during the same phase. We will discuss that next time , Until then....

Also, please feel free to comment or suggest anything that could be worth discussing or writing in the future , Thank You !