The lean concept is one which attempts to limit (or eliminate) waste in a business, particularly waste of time of a resourc

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Robin Perkins

10/25/22, 5:51 AM

The lean concept is one which attempts to limit (or eliminate) waste in a business, particularly waste of time of a resource and waste of time of a flow unit. It is important to study since resources and time of either a resource or a flow unit can cost a company in lost profit. Lean operations run better and more efficiently and can often create a better working place with better customer service.

Lean concept applied to manufacturing and service processes would work to increase efficiency and lesson waste. In the case of manufacturing this can also lead to more efficient use of labor as there will be less time spend either doing nothing or repeating a job which must be redone. 

Lean concept can work in service environments. When I worked at Burger King they had a system for getting drive thru customers orders filled and out the window in under three minutes. This created a faster experience for the customer (hence, fast food restaurant) and allowed the company to run more customers through the drive thru window, particularly at the busy mealtimes. The lean concept (before it was an idea for service industry) was that the faster flow of the order eliminated waste time of a flow unit. If a customer was waiting for a part of their order the flow rate of the drive thru was stopped which decreased the overall flow rate of the restaurant.

Lean concept could work great at a pizzeria. I worked at a pizzeria in high school and can see how this would have made the process of getting customer pizza on the table more efficiently. Just by looking at the flow and how many steps (physical for the maker as well as steps to make a pizza) it took to make a pizza it would have been fun to know this back then and analyze the process from this perspective. The first thing would be to have everything needed prepped and ready at the station. 

Lean concept is hard to implement in practice because, in the end, companies are generally dealing with people and people are unpredictable. I like the doctor’s office example in the text. Sometimes you wait longer because a patient early in the morning takes more than their allotted time and it snowballs by late afternoon into long waiting times. It is difficult to control for that. Like many things I have heard or read about along these lines it works great for machines but when you put the human factor in it mucks up the works. 

Quality and productivity are linked in the lean concept as a proportion. As productivity goes up quality will also go up. Lean processes work to create processes in which the product is created efficiently, on time, and correct the first time. This saves by reducing waste through having to rework products or take them back through the line.        

Cachon, Gerard and Christian Terwiesch. (2020). Operations Management, Second Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing.