What is Lean?

What is Lean?

Lean can be known as:

• A philosophy

• A method

• A management philosophy

• Tools and techniques

Lean is a broad approach for improving daily processes and it can be described with help of the following ideas:

• Focused attention for enhancing customer value

• Continuous improvement of processes (daily)

• Decreasing the amount of variation in processes to produce/deliver predictability

• Getting rid of wastes from processes

• Delivering just-in-time

• Delivering correctly

• Long-term relationships with all interested parties, including employees, managers, owners, suppliers, distributors, the community, the society and the environment;

Lean is a way of working where everyone in the organisation has a focus on:

1. Creating value-streams in processes for the customer

2. Eliminating wastes

3. Getting it right first time

So: a maximum added value with minimal effort and with the best quality, for the customer.

Short-term:

You can look at Lean as a collection of tools or techniques where you use these to solve problems in processes. 

Long-term:

You can also look at Lean as a philosophy where the culture of an organisation has a focus on Continuous Improvement.