The Hindu Business Line : Lean learning

Pitch creativity before capital. This is the first ‘lean’ lesson for service sector, in Debashis Sarkar’s Lean for Service Organizations and Offices ( www.asq.org). He says that before making capital investments you can use your team’s capability to come up with creative low-cost solutions and remove waste in the processes.

Though not new as a concept, ‘lean’ is yet to be leveraged in full by service companies, the author opines. “Unfortunately, fixing symptoms is the norm in many companies,” he rues. “With the objective of staying profitable, service companies have traditionally taken up cost-cutting programmes to reduce operating expenditure. For example, companies focus on cutting down on employee travel, business off-sites, and hotel stays with the hope that it will bring cost efficiency.”

Go lean, instead, he presses. But what is lean? It is “a systematic approach to identifying and eliminating waste (non-value-added activities) through continuous improvement by flowing the product only when the customer needs it (called ‘pull’) in pursuit of perfection,” as NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology, US) defines. When implementing lean solutions, do not wait for the impeccable and the best solutions, advises Sarkar. “The endeavour should be to get quick results even if they are not the best… The focus should be to improve and move on.”

Another finding is that in service processes nearly 80 per cent are ‘waste’! “A lot of time is squandered in doing things that the customer will not be willing to pay for,” the author observes.

At times, waste may arise because of customers. “For example, a customer filling out a home loan application form could provide incorrect or incomplete information that could subsequently create rework in the process.” A Web-based application, with built-in validation, can solve this problem of waste to some extent.

Sarkar brings to light the fact that, unlike as in manufacturing, processes in a service may not be visible and may also lack ownership. “Visibility of processes can be attained by documenting the processes in detail and ensuring that there are measurements to track their performance on an ongoing basis.”

If you go around organisations, you may discover waste hidden in disorganised workplaces, the author guides. His suggestion, therefore, is that before embarking on process improvements, we need to free the workplace of clutter, through 5S, for instance.

Multi-skilling of staff too helps in the ‘lean’ march. This requires job responsibilities to be expanded and also the shunning of dependence on a few people for ongoing activities, Sarkar elaborates. “For example, in a retail bank branch there have traditionally been specialists for activities such as draft, cash, teller, customer service, and so on. This leads to improper workload balancing.”
The author counsels top management to participate in regular ‘ground zero’ walks, to get a view of what is happening there. “Ground zero refers to the place where the action happens in the organisation. It refers to the workplace where the processes are run and where the customer encounters the processes.”
Practise the ‘broken windows’ theory in your workplace, he urges, citing James Wilson and George Kelling. “The theory suggests that if a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one is in charge and soon more windows will be broken, which could result in the anarchy spreading from the building to the street.” Moral: “We cannot afford to overlook the small wastes in our workplaces and processes,” exhorts Sarkar.
A book you can’t afford to overlook.

D. MURALI
http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

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