Any business in any sector can benefit from adopting Lean Principles. We work across:
– Service Sector (Public as well as Private)
– Food & Drink
– Pharmaceutical
– Medical Device
– Manufacturing
– Supply Chains
– Financial
Lean holds its roots deep in the automotive industry. It came to the world stage through the genius of Henry Ford (Ford Motors). He was the son of an Irishman and he had a famous saying
“People can have the Model T in any color so long as it’s black.”
Ford made production simple and visual. He converted batch production to flow production (sequenced processes) and implemented the concept of Standard Work where employees worked the same way to achieve the same results. Only then could you truly measure the efficiencies. This was truly revolutionary for its day and he spent his days as a true leader on the shop floor as opposed to hiding behind a desk hoping things would magically become perfect. Every day Ford would ask his employees why certain items were not moving and why finished cars in the warehouse were not being shipped to customers. This is how he developed strategies with his employees to keep everything moving along the entire process, all the way to the customer depot…
“If it’s not moving or not being shipped to the customer it’s not adding value.” Click to Tweet
To see the full background of lean please go to ‘History of Lean’
Since then, Lean has moved to many different sectors, regardless of the process being manufacturing or information / service based. In fact, Jack Welsh (CEO GE) has stated that he achieves 80% of his Lean savings in his service-based businesses as opposed to manufacturing. And when you think about it, this makes sense.
With manufacturing, there are limitations based on the constraints of a production line and the knowledge is based on systems and procedures. Service businesses are based more on the human application and knowledge, which leads to greater variables.
For example, 10 Sales Reps executing a sales process 10 different ways.
- How can you measure success?
- Which Sales Rep is performing the best?
- Which process work best, or is it a combination of some of the tasks?
Developing standard approaches means that you can measure against that standard. It may not be great in the beginning, however it’s a starting point to continually make small, incremental improvements, therefore over time becoming a very robust process. With that, any new Sales Rep joining your business will be taught YOUR way of doing sales -the way that works for YOUR business.
