Lean Production in Service Environments

Will lean production work in service environments? Why or why not?

The term lean can be described as a waste reduction and improvement methodology. Methods and principles of lean thinking spread over the military, construction and manufacturing industries. Lean methods and principles have been applied successfully across many other industries. Besides, service and transactional industries that use lean include healthcare, insurance, financial services banking, call centers, government, retail, and transportation.

Specifically, lean is a methodology that combined a set of tools and techniques designed to maximize customer value, while reducing waste along the entire value stream. Furthermore, it also focuses on improving overall efficiency, quality, and customer satisfaction.

Lean is already achieving successes in a number of service environments. As services identify their components that resemble an assembly line and are repetitive in nature, the concepts will work.

Lean services are the application of lean manufacturing concept to service operations. Here, the context of services is not limited only to administration or office but it is anything from hospital to a university, from an office process to consultancy and from warehouse to field service maintenance. Usually, in service customer standing in front of us waiting for the service while in manufacturing process constraints are found at machine level where a task time is constrained. In Manufacturing the mother of all waste is overproduction but in services the mother of all waste is over processing.

Lean focuses on reducing waste from actual product, time or money. Lean production can be applied and work in service environment. For example service at pizza restaurant. In restaurant situation, streamlining of food preparation is very important. In other words, they can actually apply 5S in doing pizza preparation. 5S is a Japanese plan for well organised work place, which eliminates the waste of looking and searching of equipment. It consists of 5 steps which is starting with the letter S, hence the name 5S housekeeping. The 5 steps are seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu and shitsuke. Seiri; sort and determine necessary equipment and materials, seiton; straighten, remove unnecessary item, seiso; sweep, clean and routine maintenance, seiketsu; standardised, make a standard and stick to it, use regular audits while shitsuke; self discipline, make 5S part of the everyday life. For instances, streamlining the preparation for ingredients of making pizza and baking process will actually increases the speed of product to customer. Fast and efficient customer ordering and payment would allow the system to process more customers.