The Lean Enterprise

Traditional quality and continuous improvement approaches have focused on an operation's value-added activities.  But these activities typically account for only 10-20% of the cost and the lead time associated with a process.  The Lean Enterprise approach, developed from the Toyota Production System, shifts the emphasis to the costs and activities between the value-add steps — the waste.  The objective is to identify and eliminate eight primary types of waste:

The current state is analyzed using Value Stream Mapping, Metrics-Based Process Mapping and Root Cause Analysis techniques.  The future state is designed so that products and services flow from the initial request or order to customer delivery.  Pull systems are employed when flow is difficult to achieve. 

Waste elimination results in achieving “flow,” and is accomplished by applying the following tools:

With flow, lead times are greatly reduced, providing greater customer value and process times are reduced, freeing resources to perform value-add work activities that are often ignored when workers are focused on correcting mistakes, expediting orders, resolving customer complaints, inspecting others' work or obtaining multiple approvals to proceed — all symptoms of waste.  In addition, quality goes up and costs go down — providing a competitive edge that leads to satisfied customers and an increased market share.