The concept of Waste faces natural obstacles

A key pillar of Lean Management is to reduce wastes, i.e. activities which “the customer would not pay for”.  The aim here is not necessarily to eliminate them but to consciously identify them and address them head on.

Before introducing Lean, normal operations would happily chug away at carrying out processes with little thought as to whether each process is waste or otherwise.

However, it is not a simple matter to simply switch to Lean thinking.  Whenever anybody attempts a paradigm shift in thinking, it is natural to feel overwhelmed by the vast effort required in re-thinking almost everything that have been on “cruise control”.  It is thus make sense to carve out bite-sized chunks to deal with.

And the effort required should not be under-estimated.  While normal operations would take many things for granted, a re-evaluation of each process would require the BAU staff to think deep into the underlying rationale behind each action and process step.  Oftentimes, teammates would have different perspectives and interpretations behind why something is done a certain way.  And if the work has been ongoing for sometime, the actual basis may have been known only to staff who have since left the company.

It is also why I feel it is important that most/all processes are based on simple principles so that the rationale/thinking behind process designs can be re-created without too much undue difficulties.