You don’t think a Lean tool will work in your area.

One of the jobs of a leader in a Lean environment is to push teams to embrace a continuous improvement culture. The often entails asking the team to try to implement one of the Lean tools in a work area. On occasion, the tool they the boss recommends is not a perfect fit. Before rejecting the tool, though, check to see if there is a way to use a modified version of it.

Problem

You don’t think a Lean tool will work in your area.

How this affects you

You are trying to solve a problem, but you don’t think the Lean tools your boss wants you to use are the right ones for the job.

Action to Take

Not all Lean tools or techniques work well in all places or for all processes. Before you discard anything, though, consider if it could be modified for your work area. 

Experiment a little. Be flexible. Take the best of what the tool has to offer and make it work for your situation. A partial benefit from a modified technique is better than no improvement at all. 

This challenge usually presents itself in the office environment. For instance, takt time can be difficult to put in place in an administrative setting. Office workers usually perform several different processes throughout the day, and each process has significant variation—phone calls vary in length due to the “human factor,” loan applications might require different levels of documentation depending on credit reports, and customer purchase orders each have different formats.

Instead of trying to rigidly apply Lean tools, find a compromise that gets most of what the tool is supposed to do, but without the limitations. In the office, trying to pace a process to takt time would frustrate a team. They would probably never be on track due to the variation. An office team, instead, might try to put in a few “checkpoints” throughout the day to account for the variation. Instead of having one credit check done at 8:04 and two done at 8:08 and three done at 8:12, your team would know that it should have thirty done by 10:00. This compensates for variation, but provides frequent indicators of whether the team is on track to meet its customers’ needs. More importantly, the team knows to take action if it is not!

Why this works

The Why this Works section is only available in print copies of Whaddaya Mean I Gotta Be Lean?