What is lean management? 5 applicable principles and benefits of Lean management
In recent years, the phrase "Lean management" has gradually become familiar to all business leaders. Lean management is not only a management method but also a philosophy, guiding managers to organize and perform work with their teams in the most optimal way. Lean management method brings businesses many valuable benefits such as helping to increase productivity, reduce waste and put customers at the center of all business decisions.
In this article, let's find out specifically what Lean management is with 1C Vietnam? What benefits does this management method bring to businesses and what are the 5 basic principles of Lean management? Stay tuned for more details!
I. What is lean management?
Lean management is a method of optimizing business operations by using resources effectively and creatively with the lowest possible investment costs. The goal of the Lean management method is to eliminate all redundant elements such as confusing processes, costs, and unnecessary workers to create a strong, lean, and resourceful organization. optimized to ensure work quality is always at the highest level while still maintaining economical costs, thereby promoting profit growth for businesses.
II. What are the benefits of Lean management?
The benefits of Lean management include 4 main points: helping to optimize costs throughout the operating process, focusing resources on core tasks, helping to operate business systems more smoothly, and helping to control quality. tight output. Bringing desirable advantages to many businesses, Lean management methods are increasingly popular and widely applied.
1. Optimize costs throughout the entire operating process
Lean management helps businesses set a direction to eliminate all costs that do not create value, including costs of raw materials, time, and human resources, as well as other unnecessary costs. This helps businesses avoid having to endure unnecessary costs while still ensuring significant profits.
2. Focus resources on core tasks
Lean management helps identify and eliminate tasks that are formal and have little practical value, so businesses can focus key resources on more important tasks. Thanks to process streamlining, each operational step always operates at peak performance, without distractions, ensuring that each step achieves optimal results.
3. Operate the system more smoothly
When the business organization process is simplified, the cooperation and coordination between departments also becomes deeper and more effective. Eliminating and cutting down unnecessary departments will also help reduce complexity in the work process, while also preventing disagreements due to too many opinions, leading to internal division. Therefore, the Lean management method revolves around eliminating cumbersome elements, creating strong links between departments so that the entire team together contributes to the rapid and sustainable development of the business.
4. Strict output quality control
When businesses apply the Lean model, managers will easily control overall operations, ensuring product quality is always stable and on schedule. Any problem, big or small, will be detected quickly thanks to the close connection between all stages of operations. From there, management levels can quickly identify process bottlenecks and take correct measures to overcome the problem, while coordinating the business to return to the correct operating "trajectory".
III. 5 basic principles in Lean management
What are the necessary steps in Lean management? To create a systematic Lean management strategy, operations experts have researched a set of basic principles to help managers easily start properly.
The 5 principles of implementing Lean management include:
Principle 1 – Process oriented:
Lean management focuses primarily on processes to change operating processes to become more progressive. For manufacturing businesses, the process is especially important because it is the deciding factor in resources, time, and product quality.
Principle 2 – Maximum value, minimum waste:
In Lean management, waste is understood as any activity that does not add value. The Lean management approach revolves around eliminating waste while increasing customer value to build competitive advantage, instead of focusing on spending a lot without creating value.
Principle 3 – Standardize work:
Applying Lean management helps businesses standardize each task, including time, results, and work process. When business operations have been standardized, product quality is also guaranteed to be uniform and costs related to erroneous orders and defective products are minimized.
Principle 4 – Create flow:
"Flow" is a process that facilitates product movement through each step in a defined sequence, helping to minimize errors, reduce waste, reduce lead times and increase flexibility.
Principle 5 – Solve problems quickly:
In the Lean management method, problems are seen as opportunities for improvement. The Plan - Do - Check - Act process (Plan - Deploy - Control - Improve) helps solve problems effectively, starting from identifying the root of the problem, developing solutions, deploying, and reviewing. Control and check results, and apply new methods, helping to save time and resources, while bringing about superior improvement efficiency.
IV. 6 factors that bring success in Lean management
Depending on the characteristics of each business, Lean management strategy will need to change and adapt flexibly according to the company's operating model to create positive results. However, in general, every effective Lean management campaign has 6 things in common as follows:
1. Clear strategic goals:
Lean management is not just a strategy, but a management method that helps businesses achieve the goals of specific business strategies. To apply Lean management effectively, businesses need to define clear goals and communicate the importance of each goal to motivate the team. From there, all employees will clearly understand the role of Lean management in supporting businesses to achieve their goals, creating momentum for autonomy in implementing Lean.
2. Leaders need to be consistent with Lean management
Senior leaders need to demonstrate commitment to Lean management through guiding actions, including communicating a clear vision for Lean applications, visiting production sites, and communicating with direct implementation personnel regularly. regularly, respect employees, and approach problems with a mindset that focuses on finding the root cause instead of disciplining employees immediately when an incident occurs.
3. Outline the value chain clearly:
The process of optimizing value and eliminating waste begins with mapping out the complete value chain from start to finish. Recognizing and deciding how to eliminate waste can be done through the process of tracking each step in the value chain, from planning the import of raw materials to the final manufactured product.
4. Set specific standards:
The foundation of the Lean management model is standardized space and work processes. Businesses can start with the 5S model to standardize the workspace, then standardize each stage of work, in order of importance from highest to lowest. Setting standards from the beginning helps businesses stabilize operating processes, maintain product quality and is a "launching pad" for other breakthrough improvements.
5. Developing front-line leaders:
Frontline leaders have an important role in cultural change and improvement, especially in the Lean management model. They are not only managers, but also the people with the greatest influence, trusted and listened to by their colleagues. Training this level of management in in-depth leadership skills and providing them with effective management tools will help create a strong impetus for improvement within the organization.
6. Reasonable resource allocation:
Lack of resources is often one of the biggest challenges when implementing Lean management. Businesses need to ensure they have enough resources to support this process. In addition to internal training and leadership development, using external Lean consultants and experts can also assist businesses in overcoming resource challenges. Using software tools to support operations management and work management is also an effective way to reduce pressure on employees.
V. Solutions to support effective promotion of Lean management in businesses - Office No. 1C: Document Management
In order to promote businesses to apply the effective Lean management model, 1C Vietnam has developed and provided the digital Office solution 1C: Document Management to help manage and operate quickly and flexibly so that businesses can always Achieve maximum value with minimum resources.
The software provides a complete set of tools to help business leaders have an overview of the company's operating status, quickly grasp broken points in the process to provide direction to "tangle the bottlenecks". the most effective.
1C:Document Management helps businesses manage a comprehensive digital office on just one screen, improve internal operating capacity, and increase positive results from the Lean management method:
*PROCESS MANAGEMENT
- Digitize the entire paper process.
- Easily monitor and control the processing flow and approval of documents and work.
*DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT
- Centralized storage management of all types of documents, reducing storage area
- Look up information quickly anytime, anywhere.
*PROJECT MANAGEMENT
- Make a clear plan, assign tasks directly to each task
- Monitor and control progress visually, allocate resources effectively
*WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT
- Assign tasks, manage and control work progress easily.
- Manage work by GPS, monitor and evaluate clear work discipline.
*OFFICE MANAGEMENT NO
- Support the management of scientific administrative work.
- Easily collect statistics, track and look up information.
- Automatically export reports quickly, the report screen is intuitive, information fields can be easily customized according to management needs.
*MOBILE APPLICATION
- Integrate digital signatures, approve documents and records anytime, anywhere.
- Control, manage and operate employees, remote work easily and conveniently.
With Office No. 1C:Document Management supporting, businesses can eliminate the burden of manual operating errors and reduce losses due to mistakes and unnecessary breaks in the process.
With 1C:Document Management in hand, businesses can easily operate and grow quickly!
Contact 1C Vietnam today for detailed advice on the most suitable solution for your business.