Lean Management!

For those of you who don’t know what Lean Management is about, here’s what it means – Lean Management is the effectiveness & efficiency of an enterprise in delivering value to its customers. In short, delivering customer value without waste. The term ‘Lean Management’ is borrowed from Toyota’s production system (lean production) and is applied to the modern day organization. There have also been books on ‘Lean thinking’ and ‘Lean solutions’ written by a few authors. Lean management (as suggested by a few authors) focuses on:-

a) Managing the scope – focus on products where benchmarking shows high costs for relatively little value
b) Understanding the customer – establish a value-definition
c) Process Ownership - assign clear process ownership for the value stream that produces the product / service.
d) Measurement – establish clear & frequent measurement of processes’ effectiveness & efficiency.
e) KAIZEN – build a culture of continuous improvement.

Well for those of you who are familiar with Six-Sigma…does it sound similar to define-measure-analyze-improve-control???