The biggest myth I run into is that Lean is about cutting costs, and by extension cutting jobs. That belief makes employees nervous and makes leaders hesitate, and it gets Lean exactly backward. Lean is about getting healthier as an organization and freeing up capacity so you can grow.
Why People Stay Quiet About Waste
When employees believe improvement leads to layoffs, they keep their heads down. They show up, do what’s in the job description and say nothing about the foolish tasks they know are wasting time. I’ve been that employee. In my first management job, I eliminated about 40% of my own job within six months because so much of it made no sense. When I left a prior job before that, I told my boss they wouldn’t need to hire anyone to replace me for nine months because I was that far ahead. Would I have told anyone that while I still worked there? Probably not. When people understand that Lean protects their jobs by making the business stronger, they start pointing out waste on their own, and morale goes up along with results.
Lean Works Well Beyond the Factory Floor
The second myth dates back to when everyone called it Lean Manufacturing, and it’s the idea that Lean only applies to companies making widgets. Law firms, hospitals and insurance companies all run on processes that serve customers, and so does nearly every other business. If you have processes and customers, the Lean principles apply to you.
What Lean and Six Sigma Actually Do
Lean is about delivering value to the customer in the most efficient way possible, and it does that by eliminating waste. Six Sigma eliminates variation. Say a process takes ten hours on average, but any given run could take anywhere from five hours to twenty. Your customer hears that their order will arrive sometime between tomorrow and next month, and nobody wants that answer. Customers want precision, so you tighten the range and then move the average to a faster, better place.
Here’s the metaphor I use for Six Sigma. Think of what your customer needs as the width of your garage, and your process as the width of your car. If the car is exactly as wide as the garage, you’re at Three Sigma, and the slightest wobble takes off a side mirror. Six Sigma gives you a garage twice as wide as the car, so you have room for normal variation and still stay within what the customer needs.
Measuring the Return
I once pulled together a Kaizen team for a vitamin and supplement manufacturer whose biggest customer, one of the largest retailers in the country, was ready to drop them over late deliveries and high prices. One of their tablet presses averaged 20 hours of downtime every time it was changed over from one product to another. The team analyzed the changeover process step by step and found a way to do it in four hours. Within the 5-day Kaizen event, we proved it. The Kaizen team and the senior management who came to observe the new process were “Wowed.”
That single change, which could be applied to all of the other presses, freed up a massive amount of production capacity without spending millions on more presses and the space to house them. The executive team now realized that they had enough capacity to double in size with the equipment they already owned. That’s how you measure Lean quantitatively, by the capacity you free up and the capital you don’t have to spend.
The cultural return shows up too. You see it when executives are high-fiving because they finally see the value, and when employees start saying Lean saved their jobs. Bring in someone who knows how to run this work and you get fast, measurable results plus a team that’s energized about the next improvement.
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