Improve your productivity and processes with a holistic lean approach

The COVID-19 pandemic is putting pressure on businesses to take quick action and confront current economic disruption. However, reacting too swiftly with short-term fixes could put your business at risk.

While you’re called to immediate response, it’s more important than ever to take time to practice critical thinking and adapt to the pandemic’s obstacles as you prepare for recovery and future growth when it subsides.

Using lean methodologies to address these new challenges could help your leaders assess your business as a cohesive whole — so that you bring forward enduring solutions to drive and sustain your operations well beyond this moment of disruption.

This approach can provide the steady direction you need to weather profound change, such as increasing productivity with your current resources or responding quickly to market shifts with new products or processes.

Below, we explore how lean methodologies can help your business develop continuous improvement strategies to sustain, and even prosper, during these challenging times.

What is lean, and how does it work?

Lean is a management and operations improvement approach that emphasizes value to the customer by focusing on quality, safety, efficiency, cost, and performance.

Developed by Toyota to help its auto manufacturing operations survive and grow after World War II, lean has since been applied across virtually every industry, including discrete manufacturing, process manufacturing, healthcare, and service industries.

During lean workshops, your organization’s leaders are coached to approach your organization holistically and unleash the potential of your best resource: the frontline employees who actually create the value — or products and services — you deliver to customers.

Through a stop-the-line mentality originally introduced in auto-production lines, lean helps employees identify issues early in a process so they don’t continue on and impact the subsequent stages.

Evolving leadership

Through lean, business leaders discover how to create a culture of kaizen — or continuous improvement — that develops and enables frontline employees to solve problems. Kaizen also aligns the entire organization to relentlessly improve its processes.