Implementing Eliminating Waste and Building Quality In- LEAN Principles

Hi, everybody.

Jody Ann Johnson here with Coffee with Jody 61st episode!

Today I’m going to be sharing with you the third and fourth LEAN Principles. The third LEAN Principle is “#Eliminating Waste” and a definition for that is anything that does not add benefit or something that your client wouldn’t pay for is considered waste. According to LEAN Principles “#Building Quality In” means that you start building quality from the very beginning instead of trying to add quality at the end.

So let’s dive right in.

Continually improving your business is something that most business owners have been doing since they started their businesses. Recently a lot of business owners have been implementing LEAN Principles and that’s no accident. It is nice to see companies embrace this concept, such as Intel and others companies large and small that have been implementing this.

It’s actually created a much more engaged workforce and better quality for their clients, and they’re able to add value not only to the business that they serve, but to society at large.

Let’s go into “#Eliminating Waste”. As I said, the definition for this is anything that doesn’t benefit your customer or that your customer wouldn’t be willing to pay for is considered waste.

I can tell you from looking inside of our business, a professional services business, we found waste in redundant work. We found waste in two people asking somebody to do the work or are asking other people to do the work. Once we’ve already asked somebody having systems where we had to go and search for something, because the nomenclature wasn’t actually as clear as it needed to be.

Where is that? Is it in this file? Is it in that file? So we wasted time searching for things. We wasted time waiting for answers. We wasted time trying to get something back from either a vendor or a client. So eliminating waste can show up in a lot of different ways in professional services business. We started looking at how we are doing that and found a lot of room for improvement.

Once you’ve looked at how you are wasting time, energy, and money, you need to consider that you might need to automate certain things in your business. I was talking to somebody today who was telling me they had an employee and a whole room that was set aside for manually entering data, that can be downloaded from the bank into #QuickBooks easily, and doesn’t require manual entry. I mean, this is a really good example of eliminating waste. So creating an automation for certain processes and procedures in your company.

The next one is “#Building Quality”. This is based on companies that have done their quality assurance testing at the end of the process, whether it was production or at the end of the service, rather than thinking through how to build quality.

At the onset, I read a really great quote about this recently that said, it’s kind of like building quality in at the end is adding baking powder after your cake is already cooked, it doesn’t work. So how do you build quality as a function of how you’ve standardized and systemize what it is that you do.

Having a consistent standard, to deliver the same way every time by everyone in the organization, which actually leads to building trust and or building quality and from the design at the onset, rather than trying to fix something that’s wrong at the end.

So these two principles are very closely related to one another. Although the thinking is a little bit different. You want to eliminate waste, look at how you can actually save time, energy, manpower, money, and then building quality in. Sometimes that’s automating a process and sometimes that’s taking a good look at design and how “#We Do What We Do”.

So with that, if you’re interested in finding out more about how you can begin implementing LEAN Principles into your professional services business, please reach out.

I can be reached at jodyjohnson@actioncoach.com or you can visit our website at www.actioncoachteamsage.com, or leave a comment in the section below.

If you got value from this, please like it, please share it, and subscribe. We’ll see you again in a couple of days with number five and number six, “#Fast Delivery” and “#Creating Knowledge”.