Topic > Lean Manufacturing in Service Environments - 753

Will Lean Manufacturing Work in Service Environments? Why or why not? The term lean can be described as a methodology of reducing and improving waste. Lean thinking methods and principles have spread to the military, construction, and manufacturing industries. Lean methods and principles have been successfully applied in many other industries. Additionally, service and transaction industries that use Lean include healthcare, insurance, financial services, banking, call centers, government, retail, and transportation. Specifically, Lean is a methodology that combines a set of tools and techniques designed to maximize customer value while reducing waste across the entire value stream. Furthermore, it also focuses on improving overall efficiency, quality and customer satisfaction. Lean is already achieving success in numerous service environments. As services identify their components that resemble an assembly line and are repetitive in nature, the concepts will work. Lean services are the application of the concept of lean manufacturing to service operations. Here, the service context is not just limited to administration or office, but ranges from a hospital to a university, from an office process to consultancy and from warehouse to field service maintenance. Usually, in service the customer stands in front of us waiting for the service while in the production process the constraints are at the machine level where the time of an activity is limited. In manufacturing the mother of all waste is overproduction, but in services the mother of all waste is processing. Lean focuses on reducing waste from actual product, time, or money. Lean manufacturing can be applied and works in a service environment. For example the service at the pizza restaurant. In the restaurant situation, streamlining food preparation is very important. In other words, they can actually apply 5S in pizza making. 5S is a Japanese plan for a well-organized workplace, which eliminates waste related to searching and searching for equipment. It consists of 5 steps starting with the letter S, hence the name 5S housekeeping. The 5 steps are seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu and Shitsuke. Seiri; order and determine the necessary equipment and materials, seiton; straighten, remove unnecessary elements, seiso; sweeping, cleaning and ordinary maintenance, seiketsu; standardized, set a standard and stick to it, use regular checks while you suck; self-discipline, make 5S part of everyday life. For example, streamlining the preparation of ingredients for making pizza and the cooking process will actually increase the speed of delivery of the product to the customer. Fast and efficient customer orders and payments would allow the system to process more customers.