What Are the 5 Lean Principles
What are the 5 key Lean principles? This is a key question that you need to ask yourself before implementing Lean. Why? These 5 principles are at the heart of what you need to know to develop a robust Lean approach and strategy. These principles make you think about key aspects of your organisation and business, what you need to improve, why and where.
By knowing more about what the 5 key Lean principles are you will take a step closer towards seeing your organisation through a customer’s lens. Once you have the necessary information and insights you can then start to prepare your implementation strategy.
There are 5 key Lean principles that encompass what Lean organisations/processes ought to strive towards;
1. Specify Value
You need to ask a vital question before starting on your Lean journey. How do you ‘specify value’? What does this mean? If you don’t have a concise and precise response then it’s likely that you don’t really know. This is not unusual.
What this question does it to make you stop and think from your customers’ perspective. This can be a seismic shift in perspective for some organisations and leaders. After all isn’t your bottom line the most important thing? Consider what happened to the British car industry in the 80’s. How do think they got on with that depth of thinking?
Specify Value – How do you answer the question?
Firstly you need to determine what ‘value’ is BUT from the customer’s perspective. Simply put these are the things that customers are willing to pay for. You need to think about this like taking your car in for a service. Your mechanic will charge you by the hour, which is fair enough. Are you happy when he/she spends 20 minutes looking for a spanner? What about if he/she spends another 10 minutes looking for an exhaust? You’re not going to be happy when you get the final bill.
When you look at value, look through your customers’ eyes. What would they be willing to pay for? You should not be expected to pay for a disorganised mechanic. It’s a valid argument. So are your customers any different? You can also look at a process and ask whether it changes the shape, nature or size of the product/service? If it does it probably is a value adding step.
You will be well on your way to specifying value by thinking about the two considerations above. When you do this for enough of your processes you’ll get a clear idea of how to define and then deliver ‘value’ from an organisational perspective. Whatever the answer, keep it at the forefront of everything you do going forwards on your Lean journey.
Knowing more about Waste will be useful.
2. Identify the Value Stream
A value stream is the sequence of activities necessary to deliver your product or service to your customer. The ‘customer’ can be internal or external. Unlike traditional up and down organisational ‘silos’ value streams cut across and connect business capabilities. Once they are understood they provide you with an end-to-end visibility of your organisation’s activity flow, from customer request to delivery.
What does this mean practically?
It means using the answer from step one above, about specifying value, and determining literally where the ‘value added’ steps are along a given pathway, service or production process. Imagine a pirate’s treasure map is akin to your shop floor? The trees, fields and streams are the equivalent to your main processes. They might be key features on the landscape but what you’re really interested in is the ‘X’ as it marks where the gold, or value, is.
Think about it this way – Outpatients is a typical acute trust department but it’s not necessarily a value stream in its own right as it is an umbrella term for all the sub departments that have outpatient appointments for their patients.
Examples of healthcare value streams might include Day Case Surgery, Neurosurgery, Falls Service, Asthma/COPD pathways. A value stream is usually a series of steps (pathway) that make up a defined service(s) or product(s). Once we know this we can then move onto to determining whether we have ‘pull’ or ‘push’ flows.
3. Establish Flow
Flow is about how ‘work’ literally flows through a system. When a system is working well patients, work, products etc move predictably along their journey. You know when you have poor flow as you will ‘see’ lots of queues and long waiting times. The things that usually interrupt flow can be categorised as Waste.
Flow and healthcare
In healthcare ‘queues’ are probably the most significant visual clue that flow is interrupted. Wherever you see a patient, process or staff member waiting you have impeded flow. The usual root causes are due to;
- an imbalance between demand and capacity of the process or staff resource
- Presence of one or more of the 8 Wastes
- Work/activity that is not fully understood i.e. how long things take to do/make
- Defects and re-work is impeding process performance i.e. we have to do things more than once (not necessarily just twice) to get the right/required output
4. Create Pull
Pull from a manufacturing perspective ensures that no product is produced until there is a demand for that specific product. Once a demand is received, or a product is ‘pulled’ by the customer a chain of events are triggered that signal ‘pull’ from the warehouse right back up the process to start of the process(es) that make up that item/product.
The opposite of ‘pull’ is ‘push’
Pull requires a significant shift in thinking from a traditional ‘push’ system. Push systems are not dependant upon a customer signal/order. Invariably they are used in conjunction with batch processes. This mentality supports maximising labour, that is keeping people busy and making things just in case they are needed. It also aims to minimise resource downtime i.e. to keep machines working. Perhaps the other major reason is to maintain profit margins by a ‘pile it high, sell it cheap’ outlook.
What about Pull in healthcare?
A good example of pull in healthcare is with diagnostics. When patients come on to a ward it is usual for a junior doctor to see the patient and begin the process of a care plan. The plan will involve a set of diagnostics available to the junior doctor. Due to time or inexperience the junior doctor typically selects all available options. This is a good example of ‘push’. More experienced clinicians would look at the specifics relating to the patient and ‘pull’ exactly what is required to help with clinical decision making.
5. Perfection
One definition of perfection is ‘the highest degree of proficiency, skill, or excellence’. From a Lean or quality improvement perspective ‘perfection’ is something that we are always striving for. The likelihood of ever reaching it is low due to changes in;
- Patient / customer needs
- Social, economic and political environments
- Technology
- Staff skill shortage
- Market/demand expectations, and so on
What’s the purpose of perfection?
The purpose of perfection is to ensure that we don’t become complacent. Examples of organisations that fell victim to complacency at the top of their industry include; Blockbuster, Nokia and Polaroid. Perhaps the biggest failure was the failure to innovate. This can be expressed in another way i.e. they failed to continually review and specify value!
This is a big lesson for any organisation large or small. Our patients’ or customers’ wants, needs and desires change. Like the saying the only constant in life is change. Aiming for perfection is one part of two halves;
- Always striving for continuous improvement
- Frequently checking that you can accurately specify value from your customers’ perspective
This is why, when you are asked what are the 5 Lean Principles, you express them in a circular manner. The Lean journey is certainly a path of continuous learning, adapting, improving and reviewing again.
Summary
Getting a good understanding of the 5 Lean principles is essential to make a real positive start to your Lean journey. Avoid jumping straight into ‘doing Lean’ without doing the pre-work as described above. I would argue the reason why many organisations fail to ask themselves ‘what are the 5 Lean principles?’ is because getting the answers can be challenging.
This is where having senior sponsorship from right at the top of the organisation is crucial. Having support from a CEO or Director of Operations can unblock blockages and get you access to data and time in key stakeholders’ diaries.
Once you have all the above you will be in a strong position to chart your Lean implementation journey. This will help you maximise your own finite improvement resource and attack areas of waste that are going to give you the ‘biggest bang for your buck’.
Next Steps
You are now able to answer ‘what are the 5 Lean principles?’ Why not put yourself to the test and have a go at documenting your responses to each of the 5 Lean principles? Don’t worry about creating a 500 page document. One sheet of A4 should be ample.
Perhaps you would like to get some help. Having an experienced guiding hand is always beneficial. Get in touch we are always ready to support the best we can?
