Lean Services

Lean Service approach is extremely important for all countries whose economies are dependent on service sectors (like USA, Japan, Germany, China, India etc.) Service sector is the largest sector of India which accounts for more than 54.40 % of total India’s GVA. Service sector comprises sectors such as a government, banking, tourism, retail, education, restaurants, consulting, media and entertainment, healthcare, hospitality and so on.

Lean Management system has been developed and successfully implemented from more than five decades in the manufacturing sector. The outcomes getting by implementation of lean in manufacturing sectors are high (like success of Toyota), now we see that it being leveraged by many service companies.

In today’s global market every organization realizing that adoption of lean/ Kaizen are must in order to remain competitive in the business. In the coming years, only companies that are efficient and able to meet the changing needs of customers will be able to survive the fierce competition. Identification of waste and elimination of waste using lean approach will be helpful in streamline the process for better utilization of resources. Companies that adopt lean will be in a better position to build an intimate relationship with customers and create a foundation of service excellence.

Lean is new to services sectors and many of them are struggling to determine the correct approach to its adoption. What is required today is a holistic approach that can help service companies to get benefits from the implementation of the lean philosophy. Just applying a few tools and techniques on few service process will deliver some benefits, but one cannot extract the full value of lean with this approach. Lean is not only a problem solving tool, which get result in short period of time. But Lean is a long term philosophy for developing strategy, process, people and partners through continual improvement. Today, if Toyota is a successful company, it’s because of their full adoption of lean principles over the last 50 years and making them a part of their organizational fabric.

Why Lean Services?

Despite of technology and training, customers are faced problems like long lead times and unpredictable error rates. A lean is not only an enabler of achieving operational excellence but also helps to bring flexibility in the operation through process and people development.

Lean methodology has the ability to address a wide range of problems faced by service industry like productivity, quality, sales, complexity reduction, cost reduction, operations risk control, flexibility, customer satisfaction, improving employee morale and involvement towards service excellence.

Benefits of Lean Services ?