Lean, above all, is a company wide philosophy and culture, which focused on a number of working principles. It provides a set of tools aimed at increasing the speed and agility of processes, to free-up capacity, assets and resources through the identification and elimination of waste and non-value added activities.

Lean Principles   Define value   Identify the value stream   Create flow   Create pull   Attain Perfection

Eliminate Waste

Waste (“muda” in Japanese) is any activity that takes up time, resources or space but does not add value to a product or service. Waste can manifest in 8 different ways:

Inventory:		Unnecessary inventory of finished goods, work in progress, or information.
Waiting:		Waiting time between the steps of a process that breaks the flow and makes it unnecessarily long, or employees waiting time as a result of not having anything to process.
Transport:		Unnecessary transfer of finished goods, work in progress or information.
Motion:		Unnecessary movement of employees.
Over-processing:		Working on a product beyond the customer needs. Under-processing is also considered waste (by not meeting the customer expectation)
Over-production:		Production that exceeds demand. Over-production is also considered the “mother of all wastes”.
Defects:		Mistakes that make the product useless or require repairs and rework.
Inappropriate use of skills:		Over- or under-qualification of the employee for the task or mismatch of skills to requirements.

Lean provides us with tools to face each kind of waste and to reduce the overall lead time.

Increment the processes’ agility

The value-added time in a typical process is below 20% of the total lead time. Lean aims at drastically reducing the total lead time by eliminating the non-value added activities, improving the flow and optimizing the sequence of operations.

Current Lead Time

Waste Detection and Elimination Using Lean Tools

Lead Time after Waste Elimination Process Step   Waste

Surprisingly enough (or maybe not), increasing the agility of a process causes both, inventory reduction and an increase of available resources as well as overall process capacity.