What is Lean Process Improvement?
Six Sigma has applications in high technology, high transaction, or expensive error environments. But what if you are in a mature industry, a service business, or an organization that handles few transactions? Perhaps Lean Thinking, focused on waste reduction, or the Theory of Constraints, focused on throughput improvement, would work better.
Lean process improvement gives you a way to see work clearly, remove what does not serve the customer, and shorten the path from order to delivery. The point is not to make people work faster for its own sake. The point is to make the process flow with less waiting, rework, inventory, motion, and confusion.
What Is Lean Process Improvement?
Lean process improvement is the practice of improving work by focusing on customer value, improving process flow, and eliminating activities that consume resources without adding value. Lean begins with Lean Thinking, a mindset for seeing waste and making work smoother.
Lean is about focus. It asks what the customer actually values, what sequence of activities creates that value, and which activities slow the work down without helping the customer. The EPA’s value stream mapping guidance describes this as mapping the process so teams can identify non-value-added activity, which is exactly the discipline a lean process improvement effort needs.
The point is sharp: adding value means work should help create customer value or enable required work. If it does neither, it adds cost, delay, or risk. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? After all, this is what managers try to do every day, or at least what they think they are doing.
How Does Lean Process Improvement Work?
There are five basic steps in assessing lean operations. The wording varies by organization, but the sequence stays stable: identify value, determine the value stream, eliminate non-value-added activity, let the customer pull products or services, and improve the process again.
Identify the Activities That Create Value
The first question is not, “What keeps everyone busy?” The first question is, “What does the customer value?” An activity creates value when it changes the product, service, information, or decision in a way the customer is willing to pay for or rely on.
Determine the Sequence of Activities
Once value is clear, map the sequence of work. This is often called the value stream. It includes the visible work, such as building the order, and the hidden work, such as order entry, backlog management, approvals, inventory handling, and shipping delays.
Eliminate Activities That Do Not Add Value
Some non-value work is legally required, operationally necessary, or temporarily unavoidable. Lean does not pretend every support activity disappears. It does ask whether the step can be removed, simplified, combined, automated, or moved closer to the point of need.
Allow the Customer to Pull Products or Services
Lean process flow improves when work is triggered by real demand rather than pushed into a queue because the system is built to produce inventory. Pull does not only apply to a factory floor. A service business can use the same idea by starting work when the next customer, department, or process step is ready to receive it.
Improve the Process Again
The fifth step is not a finish line. Lean thinking turns improvement into a cycle. After waste is removed, the team returns to the value stream and asks what the next constraint, delay, or customer frustration is.
For example, consider the most fundamental cycle within a lean manufacturing operation, the order-to-delivery cycle. The top-level activities, in sequence, are taking an order, building the order, and delivering the order.
The activities that do not add direct customer value include order entry, backlog, inventory, and shipping delays. In a lean operation, the customer might enter an order directly, the product might be made on demand, backlog and inventory might be reduced, and delivery might happen quickly.
Companies with very short order-to-delivery cycles, and without inventory as a buffer, are lean operations. Lean operations have a strong cash cycle. In general, the shorter the cycle, the leaner the operation.
Here at Bizmanualz, we carry very little inventory. Customers enter their own orders via the web, we make product on demand, and we ship it. Our order-to-delivery cycle is short: orders go out the same day if they are received before 3:00 pm US Central time, otherwise by the end of the next business day.
What Is the Lean 5S System?
Another important tool used in lean thinking is the Lean 5S system of organization. The idea is that a messy workplace, desk, or manufacturing cell makes it hard to find things, easier to get distracted, and more likely that accidents or mistakes will occur.
- Sort: sort needed and unneeded items.
- Set in Order: arrange things in their proper place.
- Shine: clean up the workplace.
- Standardize: standardize the first three S’s.
- Sustain: make 5S part of the job and keep it ongoing.
Note the visual nature of Lean. Lean Thinking is visual, picturesque, even Zen-like. It is a state of mind: clean, clear, focused on the task at hand, and free from avoidable distractions. It does not require a lot of mathematical analysis, unlike Six Sigma.
How Is Lean Different From Six Sigma?
Six Sigma is problem-focused, with a view that process variation is waste. Lean Thinking, on the other hand, is focused on process flow and views any activity that does not add value as waste. Six Sigma uses statistics to understand variation. Lean uses visuals: process mapping, flowcharting, value stream mapping, and visual dashboards to understand the process flow.
Program |
Six Sigma |
Lean Thinking |
|---|---|---|
View of Waste |
Variation is waste |
Non-value-added activity is waste |
Application |
|
|
Tools |
Math and statistics |
Visualization |
Focus |
Problem focused |
Process flow focused |
Taiichi Ohno is credited with creating the Toyota Production System, one of the best-known implementations of Lean Thinking. Toyota describes the system’s objective as eliminating waste and shortening lead times so vehicles can be delivered quickly, at low cost, and with high quality in its official Toyota Production System overview. That origin matters because Lean is not simply a housekeeping method. It is a system for improving flow.
Lean Thinking is ideal for mature industries, slow-growth operations, low-transaction environments, small businesses, and organizations where mathematical tools are not common. It begins to use systems thinking and considers all of the process interactions that create or block flow.
But Lean is still a reductionist approach focused on eliminating waste and cutting avoidable costs. What is needed is to balance the resources released through Lean or Six Sigma improvement programs with an increase in throughput and the need for resources. Otherwise, the organization can enter a cost-cutting, job losing cycle, and the lean process improvement program will grind to a halt.
What Is the End Result of Lean Process Improvement?
If you are in a mature, slow-growth, low-transaction, or non-math business, Lean Thinking can work well for your organization. The desired end result is lean process improvement: smoother process flow, less waste, shorter cycles, clearer workplace organization, and better alignment between work and customer value.
The Theory of Constraints takes the concepts of Lean Thinking to another level of systems thinking. Lean can free resources. Theory of Constraints can help decide where those resources should go next so the system produces more throughput, not just lower cost.
That is the practical meaning of lean process improvement. It is not a one-time cleanup project or a slogan about efficiency. It is a disciplined way to see value, flow, waste, pull, and constraint together, then improve the process again. The strongest programs keep that cycle visible enough for managers and front-line employees to use every day.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Lean Process Improvement?
Lean process improvement is a method for improving work by increasing customer value, improving flow, and reducing activity that adds cost, delay, or risk without helping the customer.
How Does Lean Process Improvement Reduce Waste?
It reduces waste by mapping the value stream, identifying steps that do not add value, and redesigning the process so work moves with less waiting, rework, inventory, motion, and confusion.
What Is the Difference Between Lean and Six Sigma?
Lean focuses on process flow and non-value-added activity. Six Sigma focuses on process variation and defects. Both can improve operations, but they start from different views of waste.
How Does 5S Support Lean Process Improvement?
5S supports lean process improvement by making the workplace easier to see, use, clean, standardize, and sustain. A clear workplace makes waste, delay, and disorder easier to spot.
When Should a Business Use Lean Instead of Six Sigma?
A business should consider Lean when the main problem is flow, waiting, handoffs, inventory, motion, or non-value-added work. Six Sigma fits better when variation, defects, and statistical process control are the dominant problems.
