Organizations serve customers by providing services or products.
To differentiate your company from other similar businesses, you can create value for your customer.
A way to create value for your customer starts by reviewing your business processes, identifying which ones are not truly needed to deliver what the customer is expecting from your services or your products, and eliminate them. Makes sense, right?
That is a basic principle of the Lean methodology.
There are internal processes that may be lacking value to the customer and that is a strain on the organization's time & resources. The Lean approach establishes that those non-added value activities are known as waste.
Per the Lean principles, waste, or "muda", consists of the following, known as the deadly wastes:
Focus on identifying and eliminating all processes that add no value to the customer. By eliminating those non-value-added processes, your company will move towards efficiency, effectiveness, and profitability.
Certainly, this can be applied to almost every working scenario, not exclusively to manufacturing. Watch out for reports with no clear focus, meetings without clear objectives, time in line waiting, paperwork, operational procedures, people asking for directions, and so on.
An example could be a patient in a hospital (customer) asking a nurse where is the bathroom. The nurse walks out of the office and directs the patient to the bathroom, this is Motion. Many healthcare facilities are making the floor with a line that directs them to the bathroom, or the XRays, or the Laboratory... That line eliminates the waste of motion. The patient can direct himself to their desire location without asking a healthcare professional and taking them out of their work.
Look for signs of waste, many things are happening around us that are not centered on our customer.
Your customer will appreciate the change and your business processes will have a smoother flow. Definitely a win-win!
Sometimes we are very involved in the processes, and -as a consequence- our eyes are not able to find waste. If that is the case, you can look for assistance internally. More eyes could be beneficial for many reasons. Consider diversity, balance, previous backgrounds and experiences, opinions, other points of view, among many more. Look to in-source cooperation to help you in the process of identifying waste. Having knowledge of your business and its processes, this team-work could make it easier and faster to start identifying those non-value-added activities.
If you need another set of eyes to help you identify waste, I am available! Please feel free to contact me. Send me an email with more details: MyLogisticsLab@gmail.com. Also, please feel free to suggest new topics! You can send me an email, or reach me via social media (Facebook / Instagram @ItsGloriaIsamar | LinkedIn @GloriaIsamarRivera).
About the Author: My name is Gloria Isamar Rivera. I have more than 17 years of combined experience in business administration, marketing, customer service, supply chain, logistics, and 3PLs. I consider myself a young professional, a supply chain leader, and an out-of-the-box strategist. I enjoy the simple things in life and value every process as a learning experience. Looking forward to sharing something interesting for you very soon! Thank you for reading! ;-)
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