Implementing Lean - Are you willing to be relentless?

Lean, Six Sigma, the Toyota Production System, all have tremendous power and potential to improve a company's operations.  They can fix many problems quickly.  Unfortunately because of this many people tend to think of them as “quick-fix” solution.  In reality to be truly effective you have to adopt these concepts as a way of life.  It is not just a tool for fixing manufacturing problems.  It’s the way we do business – from the way we manufacture, to the way we purchase our materials, to the way we handle sales and even to the way we do our back office operations.  It is only when we buy into this at the emotional level will we be able to be relentless in our use of it.  And being relentless is the key.

Bill Carreira of Carreira Consulting and Bill Trudell of Val-Stream Consulting have written a book on Lean Six Sigma aptly named "Lean Six Sigma That Works".  This book gives a good overview of the Lean Six Sigma techniques and show the power and value of applying these techniques.  The part that really caught my attention came in the last chapter where they state:

"The psychology of Lean Six Sigma is not just about improvement.  It's not even about continuous improvement.  It is about relentless improvement.  To be truly successful in applying or implementing Lean Six Sigma, you and your organization have to have the mindset of relentless improvement.  This means a never-ending stream of efforts to drive improvement into your organization, product or service quality, and profitability."

This was reinforced in a recent post entitled Don't Talk to Us About Toyota on the Gemba Panta Rei blog where Jon Miller states:

"It's not what's in the factory, it's what's in the minds of people. It's a will to make things better. It's a will to personally make things better. It's a will to make things better that is absolutely relentless [emphasis added] and determined. It's a will to improve quality, customer service, safety, the work environment, cost no matter how challenging."

At this point I'm sure the common reaction might be "This is great but what has it to do with IT?"  As I said, I believe that Lean is a tremendously powerful concept.  We in IT can use this internally in our operations for such things as how quickly we change out PC's or handle Help Desk issue.  More importantly we in IT can use major system changes to help the business implement Lean.

• Our ERP scheme if properly implemented can be a key single source of the information company managers need to implement Lean.
• As managers implement Lean in their processes they rely about flexible, agile IT systems and processes to support it.

IT can be an important factor in the implementation of Lean from providing process alternatives and providing information.  We need to be relentless in our use of Lean:

• internally in our own processes - we have to "walk the talk"
• in working with managers implementing Lean processes
• in structuring systematized processes and providing data.

As businesses focus on becoming Lean the organizations that truly "get it" will be relentless in their implementation and relentless in there demands on IT.  Are you ready to be relentless?