Lean Manufacturing: how can you apply it to a service company?

Companies today want to optimize their time by achieving better results. They try to increase their productivity using half of the time by simplifying processes and manual tasks that need a lot of time that may be devoted to other more pressing functions in your company. 

Within the methodologies devoted to processing improvement, we can emphasize Lean Manufacturing which is a philosophy based on eliminating the elements that don't add value in the production chain. By implementing it, you can get better quality products and more agile and efficient procedures. 

Lean manufacturing uses the strictly necessary resources to foster the growth of a company. Its goal is to eliminate waste to improve the quality, reduce the time of production and costs. Most of the expenses are calculated during the design stage of a product. 

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This improvement methodology for efficiency in manufacturing has its origin in Japan and was designed by Taiichi Ohno, CEO of Toyota; he was inspired by mass production in US factories. He realized that the waste produced was not useful for them and they had to discard it. There, he understood that the resources that didn't add value could be reduced. 

For instance, an engineer can choose known materials and processes, even if there are more economic or efficient ones. This reduces the risks of the project but increases the financial risks and reduces the advantages. A smart company develops and analyzes checklists to validate the design of a product.   

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Key principles of Lean Manufacturing

The key principles of Lean Manufacturing can be summarized as follows: 

• Perfect quality from the beginning: search of flaws, detection, and solution of problems.
• Waste minimization: elimination of all the activities that don't add value, optimizing the use of scarce resources (capital, people, space).   
• Continuous improvement:  cost reduction, quality improvement, productivity increase, and information sharing.
• Pull processes: products are requested by the final customer and not pushed by the production. 
• Flexibility: producing different mixtures of a great variety of products quickly without affecting the efficiency due to less production. 
• Building and maintaining a long-term relationship with suppliers, making commitments to share risks, costs, and information. 

Lean Manufacturing is a methodology that can be applied in any sector of the industry since it allows you to optimize the quality of your products by reducing the waste that doesn't add value to your products, services, or processes (resources, costs, and time). In this article, we will focus on how this operative methodology is applied to a service company. 

How can you apply Lean Manufacturing to a service company? 

Lean Manufacturing can be thought of as a management philosophy to optimize the resources of a company, and increase the value in the processes that contribute to the productivity and efficiency of companies; it also allows you to detect useless, obsolete, and repetitive processes that delay the normal functioning the company should have. 

The steps we explain below are the Lean Manufacturing actions that will help you identify waste in your service company, detecting what adds value and what doesn't.

• Analyze production processes 

Before implementing lean manufacturing, it's important to analyze all the processes so you can detect waste in their execution. For instance, your employees may be duplicating tasks when they could use a management tool to accelerate this process and enter information just once. 

In this case, implementing a digital management tool can be very helpful to avoid this information waste since you'll be able to do any task automatically instead of manually (as was carried out before), reducing the time of work but doing work better. 

• Analyze the best way for the implementation by acquiring a digital management tool

You've already analyzed the processes and, surely, you've detected errors and waste that should be eliminated to preserve the company's resources. You may have realized some overworked employees do their job manually and spend hours carrying out one task. 

Then, a simple and intuitive digital tool for management is the best solution for reducing working time and making it more efficient. Therefore, you get that time back and increase the productivity of your staff; a management tool will increase improvement in your production processes. 

• Correct the errors in your processes by eliminating time and resource waste

Implementing a management tool will help you with the manual entry of information thanks to a tool that will save you time, paper and ink expenses because you won't need to save physical data that can be lost or damaged. 

In any service company, a management tool will be very helpful since it also allows you to manage customer service better by replying faster to customers' inquiries. 

At the same time, apart from the efficient solution of eliminating manual entry of data and optimizing the communication with your customers and employees, you'll have to take into account the waste produced by machinery resources. 

In this context, it's very common that non-efficient workers spend more resources than needed; for example when they install Internet and cable tv in a house and make a deficient connection in which they use more resources than needed to provide these services. 

Of course, in this case, the smarter solution is not to fire workers because of their inefficiency, but to train them properly so that they don't make the same mistakes again; these mistakes cost the company a lot of time and money and jeopardize its profitability.

We hope this article in which we talk about the methodology known as Lean Manufacturing for process optimization and error reduction is useful for you to avoid the waste of resources that affects your company and puts obstacles in the goals you want to achieve.