Lean in Service and non-manufacturing
What is service ?
Service is anything that has a customer and doesn’t deliver a physical product that the customer can take away, but creates something that its customer needs, desires, requires or demands, and therefore places a value on it.
Examples of service
Local Government
Health-care
Entertainment
Maintenance department in a manufacturing company
Finance departments
Sales offices
Entertainment industry
What are your service problems ?
Is there a difference between manufacturing and service organisations ?
Maybe, but only in quite subtle ways:
| Organisational DNA | Manufacturing companies | Service organisations |
| What do we sell ? | Products with a service element | Services often packaged as products |
| What are we made of ? | Culture – People – Processes | Culture – People – Processes |
| How can we improve ? | - Create flow - Manage constraints - Remove waste - Understand customer value |
- Create flow - Manage constraints - Remove waste - Understand customer value |
| What are the components of our DNA ? | - Customer satisfaction - Employee satisfaction - Operational excellence |
- Customer satisfaction - Employee satisfaction - Operational excellence |
In manufacturing the main resources are people and then machines. In service your main resource is people. Therefore the only subtle difference is that service needs to focus even more on employee satisfaction and leadership. In this context there may be a difference, in reality for Lean QCD leadership is all or nothing, and to be successful it needs to be all !
Therefore the application of lean and leadership will help you to achieve performance excellence.
The goal in service is to achieve performance excellence
For a more detailed definition please see Performance Excellence
Lean QCD approach to improving performance excellence in service
Our aim is to improve your customer service, whilst reducing waste and increasing your capacity, thereby enabling you to sell more with the same amount of resource or to provide a better service with the same resource.
By following this approach you will improve your customer satisfaction, reduce costs and satisfy your employees – a win-win-win situation.
Lean QCD can offer a complete implementation solution, bringing along your people step by step as we develop a full lean system within your organisation.
We apply lean tools using goal deployment, KPI review and service level agreements to stabilise and standardise improvements.
We are so confident that our approach works that we offer a full refund of our fee if the agreed results are not achieved.
