Creative Shortcuts in Lean Improvement

Lean Improvement need not have to do ONLY with improving business processes as they are currently. True Lean Improvement may come from some creative shortcuts also, sometimes.

Lean Improvement may not just have to do with doing something more efficiently. Instead of asking the question, "How can I do this faster or cheaper?" it might be worthwhile to ask the question "Tell me now. Why am I doing this?"

James Womak and Daniel T,.Jones in their Harvard Business Review article on Lean Consumption, describe how Fujitsu solved some problems with their British Midland contract.

Fujitsu won the British Midland contract in 2001 to maintain and service computer hardware found at the British Midland offices at all the airports worldwide among other things. Fujitsu found that almost 26% of the field service calls to these offices dealt with the same kind of problems with the ticket printers at these offices.

The same kind of handful of problems, again and again.

So Fujitsu, talked to HP, the maker of these printers and fixed these problems at their source, the design and manufacturing end of things. They eliminated support calls instead of figuring out how to do it faster or cheaper!

The same principles apply to many, many business processes, and even, software development.

In business processes, seeing the same problem over and over again should ideally lead to something other than doing the same thing faster or cheaper. These are problems that should ideally be eliminated from being ever seen again. This is where feedback from service providers is invaluable to the buyers of these services.

In software development, many usability issues, bugs and problems that come up repeatedly in support should be fed back to engineering for fixing in the upcoming releases.

Creative Lean Improvement goes beyond just to looking at how things are done now. They should be addressing how better they can be done in the future. Even better yet, why do some of them, if they can be avoided completely.

Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing... layout, processes, and procedures. - Tom Peters