Operating model
Lean management: Forget drifts, let's get back to basics!
Hugues Menard, Director
Improving performance and operational excellence goes far beyond cost reduction. In fact, how do you deliver more value to customers by minimizing the energy expended by overworked teams and driving efficiencies over time? A return to the fundamentals of lean management is essential to ensure these goals are met over the long term. Even though its excesses have been widely denounced, Lean has more than proven itself in terms of economic performance, which is what all companies, without exception, are looking for.
Lean Management is an approach initiated in the industrial sector and developed by the automotive sector and now widely used in other sectors of activity (banking, retail, services, public sector, etc.), makes it possible to achieve significant results in the various functions of the company (operations, purchasing, development, commercial functions, back office, etc.), with cost reductions of around 20 to 30%.
However, this hunt for waste is not always successful and the results do not always meet expectations. In fact, 3 out of 4 companies do not really progress with Lean over time. The difficulty lies in the ability of teams to go beyond the technology to the Lean state of mind, which creates new reflexes in managers and operators, and to embed this practice in their daily lives.
It is not a matter of reinventing an approach that has proven itself for more than 50 years, but of reconnecting with its fundamentals. Especially since Lean Management has been misused in certain contexts to simply reduce costs or even to justify downsizing - abuses and devastations that have been widely reported here and there. This is why we advocate a return to the sources of Lean Management, taking into account at the same time 3 complementary values: economic value, customer value and employee value.
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Economic value. It is about addressing the issues of cost, time to market, production capacity, deadlines, quality, inventory... everything that affects the performance of the company in a process of improvement. In reality, it is a matter of seeing every problem as an opportunity for improvement and of constantly challenging the existing in order to move the company forward, making it more competitive in the long term.
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Value for the customer. It is a matter of identifying the fair value perceived by the customer, that is, of seeing with his eyes, of grasping the real problems, that is, as he perceives them and lives them. . First challenge: know all your customers, whether internal or external. The second challenge is to identify the sources of non-added value for them (processing times, quality of service, "effective the first time"...). Only through regular monitoring through "voice of the customer" approaches will the company contribute to a sustainable increase in customer satisfaction.
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Value for the employee. Lean Management remains a question of people, far beyond being a toolbox, and that approach must be done by and for the internal company, not against it. It is therefore advisable to put on the glasses of the employees in order to identify the non-value-added tasks, the daily irritations (the coffee machine that always breaks down, a painful posture, communication problems between departments, etc.) that are just as much obstacles to the sustainable establishment of a Lean culture. To ignore them is to degrade the social climate and create a toxic environment for the company.
Employees are the key links that need to be nurtured every day, because their daily actions create value. Contrary to a top-down approach, the involvement of managers and teams is a sine qua non for sustainable success, activating the levers of listening, pride, recognition and development. In fact, lean, when used well, can counteract the excesses of which it is accused and even create the conditions for individual flourishing and a peaceful social climate!
It is the joint consideration of these 3 values that anchors the success of Lean, over time, around 3 strong cultural inflections:
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Develop an obsession with value that goes beyond the pursuit of excellence
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Convincing that progress is always possible, beyond the achievement of performance
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Making the manager a coach, beyond the role of pilot and controller
Let's be clear: Lean is not a short-term approach. It is a long-distance race that takes place in successive and evolving stages over time: identification and analysis of the problem, in-depth study, action plan, measurement of impact, control, and so on... Continuous improvement, when does it stop? We are tempted to answer: "Never". At Toyota, it's been going on for 50 years, and it's still going on. When "The Machine that Changed the World"* was published, Toyota was half the size of General Motors. Today, Toyota has largely surpassed it, and the Japanese company is the greatest automotive industrial success of the past 50 years.
In lean, as elsewhere, there are no silver bullets. Today, it's a completely different way of thinking about the human being at the heart of the production machine, as an essential player in the creation of value. And more than ever, that value is growing!
* Published in 1990, “The Machine that Changed the World” by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones and Daniel Roos has become a reference work on “lean management”. It is based in particular on the largest study ever conducted in the industry by MIT - 5 years of studies in 14 countries. The authors of the book were the first to unveil Toyota's “lean” production system, the foundation, according to them, of the incredible growth and lasting success of the Japanese firm.