Deseret News Archives,
Sunday, December 16, 2001

Edition: All
Section: Money
Page: M01
Length: 68 lines

Thinking lean is good for business

In our program at BYU, we generally delay several years before recommending such new concepts, waiting for them to be subjected to the rigors of reality and widespread trials in many different companies. Then, if time proves the worth of the idea, we will begin to teach it to our students and to recommend it to ongoing companies.

Along these lines, we have been teaching the concepts of Lean Thinking for a few years now and believe that it should be widely adopted. We think that Lean concepts are fundamentally correct.

Lean means getting rid of waste. But the search for waste is far more extensive and, in the end, more revolutionary than you can initially imagine. The elimination of waste is not just a technique or a procedure, it is a change in the way a business is viewed.

The heart of the Lean concept is to think about processes or activities that add value to the product or service that you deliver. Value can be defined only by the ultimate consumer. Therefore, activities that your company may do to be more efficient may not have real value unless those activities give the consumer some benefit.

Ultimately, the elimination of waste may require rethinking the most basic assumptions of the company. For instance, in manufacturing, bigger and faster is not always better. In service companies, the very service you offer may not be the service that the customer really wants, but is a compromise because the real service is not offered.

Lean thinking goes beyond the identification of true value and elimination of processes that do not add value. When the process or service sequence is reduced to its essential value-added steps, then the process needs to be arranged so that it flows easily. The arrangement of steps to create this flow is, in itself, a process of waste elimination. A basic principle of Lean is that delays and disruptions in the process are wasteful and should be eliminated.

Another major tenet of Lean Thinking is that a company should avoid benchmarking against the competition. The real benchmark is perfection. A company should focus on eliminating waste in all its processes, and measuring itself constantly against an ideal standard. For Lean companies, doing better than the competition is not good enough.

An amazing application of Lean thinking is found in a home-building company in Dallas. This builder grew weary of the problems associated with building a large tract of homes and then struggling to sell them when they were done. He therefore initiated a system where the home buyer was invited to design the home in the office of the builder using a computer visualization system. There are, of course, hundreds of choices to be made from floor plan to wallpaper, but with just an afternoon or two of work, the house specifications can be completed. From that point, the house can be completely built and delivered within a month.

If you have further interest in Lean principles, you can consult the book "Lean Thinking" by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones, published by Simon & Schuster.

A. Brent Strong is associated with the BYU Center for Entrepreneurship. He can be contacted via e-mail at cfe@byu.edu.

© 2001 Deseret News Publishing Co.