Most of you face the same problems: you recognize you have big opportunities for improvements in your operations, but face big hurdles getting the right things done. Since many of you are in senior leadership positions, you are entrusted with making decisions to steer the ship. Even if your firm is doing well, your challenges will include:

• becoming more customer focused;
• delivering ever-higher quality, and more innovative products;
• being more responsive and agile in responding to customer needs;
• shortening lead times;
• further integrating your supply chain;
• controlling manufacturing costs;
• investing strategically in new technologies that deliver a clear return on investment;
• implementing lean throughout your organization; and
• enlisting the support of your people, and empowering and mobilizing them to achieve more.

So where do you start? Let’s first consider all of these challenges with a lean mindset. When viewed this way, you can make considerable progress by aggressively attacking wasteful activities and procedures. I’ll illustrate this by applying waste reduction language to some of your challenges: "Enlisting the support of your people, empowering and mobilizing them." Let’s simplify the language: you are paying employees, don’t waste their time and don’t waste their skills. Train them, use them, and get them to help you out.

Let’s try another: "Delivering ever-higher quality, and more innovative products." Simplified: don’t waste your customers’ time by giving them lousy products with features and functions that don’t add value and that they don’t want to waste money paying for.

So if you view your manufacturing facility as being riddled with waste, (which they all are, so don’t feel alone) then you’ll see the need to get rid of it. Before long, you’ll develop an insatiable appetite for waste reduction. This is what happens to lean practitioners when they see success from their efforts. This is when lean dabblers become lean devotees.

If you reach this stage, I’ll offer a word of caution: be tactful in spreading the lean gospel. Like reformed smokers, people who suddenly see the "lean light" can be downright annoying. Consider also that you and your colleagues have probably been working waist deep in waste for years, and all of you should have spotted it and done more to remove it. So don’t point fingers – just get to it. Start with some easy to pick low-hanging fruit and build on your success. Recruit outside help if you think it will get you started more quickly and increase your success.

You can’t do it all at once, and you can’t do it all alone. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. But start somewhere. You can take a big bite out of waste – one bite at a time.

Todd Phillips, Editor
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