Lean Management Consulting

Many organizations have embraced Lean Management, or some variant, to improve their operating performance.  In simplest terms Lean Management is an operating philosophy designed to focus on what customer’s value and to help managers eliminate unnecessary waste.  It fosters a continuous process improvement mind set. While fairly simple when viewed in these terms, it is difficult to implement and sometimes gets confused or patched together with other problem solving methods (like Six Sigma Management and Kaizen.) While eliminating waste from processes is arguably a universal goal, rigidly following lean flow principles is sometimes difficult in project and batch oriented environments.  Our Lean consulting experts work with organizations to sort out the complexities of lean process improvement and help build the appropriate management infrastructure and toolkit to drive continuous improvement.

Improving Lean Management Discovery & Analysis

For our Lean consulting services, we look at your product family work streams and identify where value is added where it is lost.  We look at how work flows through your operation and review how you currently plan, schedule, execute and measure output. We assess what parts of the value stream are suitable for push or pull scheduling techniques. We also look at how your managers control and react to waste and process variation and what tools they have to drive Lean process improvement. Understanding the flow, control system, and management behavioral gaps helps us build specific linkages between your financial and operational performance, and quantify potential improvement.

Development

Our Lean consulting experts work directly with your people, observing and quantifying the impact of day-to-day operating problems from order entry, to capacity planning and scheduling, to material flow, handling and distribution. This focused analysis allows us to help identify breakdowns in existing flow design, operating processes, management systems, and organizational behaviors that are restricting throughput and service. We work with you to quantify current performance gaps and identify what specific changes need to be implemented.

Implementation

We take an integrated team approach, working closely with your managers to implement planning and process changes that free up constraints and better balance workflow. We also build or refine management systems to better schedule and control the business, and improve the data integrity of information systems to ensure accurate, reliable tracking and reporting both internally and externally.

Sustainability

To make certain these improvements are sustainable, we provide your management teams with the coaching, training, and tools required to control the flow of material and information throughout the value chain.  Refining management information and operating reports to ensure performance visibility also helps to reinforce a culture of continuous improvement.