Lean Enterprise. It’s the one word we all know, waste. In fact we can be more specific, any human activity which absorbs resources but creates no value; errors that need to be rectified, producing parts that no one wants, moving a customer order through various departments for approval, building inventories of material, groups of people waiting around whilst upstream operations have not delivered on time. These are just a few examples we can all relate to in our business and personal lives. The disease of the waste and not creating any value, has a powerful antidote; Lean and Six Sigma. Lean is discussed here, whereas as Six Sigma is discussed later, However, the combined power of these has been offering businesses involved in manufacturing, service, retail, public services, construction and financial services huge bottom line savings and generating massive revenue opportunities through their ability to further differentiate themselves. When people hear lean, they think ‘manufacturing’, but the principle of speeding up processes applies to non- manufacturing (transactional) processes as well as manufacturing. In fact, even if you wished to improve only manufacturing cost, quality, and lead-time, you would have to improve the velocity, responsiveness, and quality of the associated transactional processes as well. Lean means speed, not manufacturing. Eliminating waste is common sense, yet it continues to elude many companies in every sector and activity from process waste (things that manufacturers do as a function of their production system design), business waste (things all businesses do as a function of their business process design) and pure waste (things we all do because it is more convenient than changing). It does not matter how you categorise the waste, nor how you wish to pursue its elimination, one thing remains constant; that is all around us that if we looked we can see and if we tried we could stop. There are models and structures that allow you to identify and eliminate this waste to increase your productivity, and hence cost structures, that have a direct impact on the customer and your bottom line. The seven deadly wastes look like manufacturing conditions, yet we see very clear and similar conditions in service and financial sectors. As with many approaches to radical transformation, a framework is needed to steer the improvement in the right way. This is where we need to approach the ‘lean’ initiative within a coherent framework where ‘islands of excellence’ are not developed in isolation of the rest of the business.

Lean Enterprise Visualising how the business system works in its entirety can be achieved through value stream mapping. Here we can see that a lean measure of time can be improved from 20 days throughput time (with 150 touches) to less than 5 days (with 20 touches) Another lean measure, in this instance for a supply chain, is demand amplification. Here we can see the lean effort transforming the demand amplification from a 4:1 to a 2:1 – having a significant effect to working capital requirements for the business