Is Lean a dichotomy?

Author: Paul Wilson
Date: Jul 1, 2009 - 11:07:52 AM

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When I mention the word ‘lean’ in a business context some people tell me it stands for making people redundant and making do with the absolute minimum amount of people. In reality this cannot be further from the truth.

Think about it, if the objective of lean is to remove the non-value added activities from a process enabling ‘value to flow’ so that the customer receives a better quality service or product, then this definition just doesn’t make sense.  Anything that would jeopardise this objective being achieved is not in the customer’s best interests and therefore by definition cannot be as a result of a lean programme.   

Instead Lean is a philosophy concerned with making processes more robust and predictable by removing ‘stuff’ that gets in the way like waiting time, bottlenecks and situations likely to induce quality issues. Lean is about making processes work better by involving the workforce and not just reducing the workforce. It is true that sometimes the process improvements thrown up efficiency gains following lean introduction can result in fewer people being required to carry out a particular activity but it is also true that it is sometimes necessary to introduce people into the process to make it work more smoothly.

Also lean organisations which understand the philosophy try to re-assign people from non-value-adding activities to value adding activities because they understand that human talent is the greatest asset a company can have. Each person is a ‘process expert’ in their own right and the knowledge they have is invaluable.

In summary, Lean is not a dichotomy, it is just sometimes badly implemented, mis-understood and used as part of a political agenda.

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