Lean Services
Lean, as a concept or brand, has captured the imagination of many in different spheres of activity. Examples of these from many sectors are listed below.
Lean principles have been successfully applied to call center services to improve live agent call handling. By combining Agent-assisted Automation and Lean's waste reduction practices, a company reduced handle time, reduced between agent variability, reduced accent barriers, and attained near perfect process adherence.
Lean principles have also found application in software application development and maintenance and other areas of information technology (IT). More generally, the use of Lean in information technology has become known as Lean IT.
A study conducted on behalf of the Scottish Executive, by Warwick University, in 2005/06 found that Lean methods were applicable to the public sector, but that most results had been achieved using a much more restricted range of techniques than Lean provides.
A study completed in 2010 identified that Lean was beginning to embed in Higher Education in the UK (see Lean Higher Education).
The challenge in moving Lean to services is the lack of widely available reference implementations to allow people to see how directly applying lean manufacturing tools and practices can work and the impact it does have. This makes it more difficult to build the level of belief seen as necessary for strong implementation. However, some research does relate widely recognized examples of success in retail and even airlines to the underlying principles of lean. Despite this, it remains the case that the direct manufacturing examples of 'techniques' or 'tools' need to be better 'translated' into a service context to support the more prominent approaches of implementation, which has not yet received the level of work or publicity that would give starting points for implementors. The upshot of this is that each implementation often 'feels its way' along as must the early industrial engineers of Toyota. This places huge importance upon sponsorship to encourage and protect these experimental developments.
Read more about this topic: Lean Manufacturing
Famous quotes containing the words lean and/or services:
“Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights.
Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Working women today are trying to achieve in the work world what men have achieved all along—but men have always had the help of a woman at home who took care of all the other details of living! Today the working woman is also that woman at home, and without support services in the workplace and a respect for the work women do within and outside the home, the attempt to do both is taking its toll—on women, on men, and on our children.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)