Lean Management

Lean Management is a business system for organizing, managing development, operations, suppliers, & customer relations. Organizations use lean principles, practices, and tools to create precise customer
value-goods and services with higher quality and fewer defects-with less human effort, less space, less capital, and less time than the traditional approaches.

One of the primary focuses of lean is to eliminate waste; i.e. anything that does not add value to the final product gets eliminated. A second major focus is to empower people at lowest level, and make operational decisions at the lowest level possible.

Lean applies to non manufacturing settings just as strongly as it applies to manufacturing. Many of the most exciting breakthroughs are taking place in services as diverse as software development, banking, health, BPO and government.

Lean Management - Leading the ongoing process of identifying and eliminating waste. This requires that we continually view processes from the respective of "Where is the waste?"

Why Lean?
- Necessity to survive
- Reduce cash to cash cycle
- Improve quality & service to customer
- Improves employee morale

Defining Value:
Value Added (VA) activity - any activity that changes the form, fit or function of materials or information to meet customer requirements.
Non Value Added (NVA) activity - all other actions & unwanted features are by definition - WASTE adding no value to the customer

Seven Types of Waste:
- Defects
- Overproduction
- Inventory
- Motion
- Processing transactions
- Transportation
- Waiting