Lean systems

"Applying Lean systems approaches, in their broadest sense – to question how best to achieve required outcomes, remove waste, and focus on customer need."

Lean systems approaches have had a considerable impact in reducing waste and improving the service delivered to the customer throughout industry, but has only recently been applied to the public sector. Many people think it is just another name for business process improvement (BPI) – but it is much wider than that. Whereas BPI is a useful set of tools for examining existing processes, and making them more efficient (usually removing wasteful steps, much as a lean approach would do), lean systems thinking is more of a philosophy that pervades an organisation and sets the context in which tools such as those for BPI are used. The key element of lean is that it is customer focused – it looks at processes from the point of view of the customer, rather than of the provider – but in the process, yields benefits to the provider. Another point is that it asks fundamental questions about processes – why are we doing them, and not just how can we do them better. It seeks to go back to first principles about the outcomes sought, and identifies processes and approaches for achieving them. A third element is that it involves the staff who do the work – it’s not a top-down approach from the management, but a way of approaching change that recognises that the staff who do the job understand it more than anyone else.