Key Points

• The original ideal around Lean is to eliminate waste and reduce the number of bottlenecks within an organization.
• There is no doubt that it can be applied to businesses of all sizes and from various sectors.
• Lean thinking offers companies the opportunity not only to eliminate waste but also to increase profits and enhance customer or patient satisfaction.

In the world of business methodologies and project management, Lean has quickly become one of the most focused and popular. Based on the history of Japanese manufacturing techniques, Lean thinking is a concept that can be applied to various industries worldwide with outstanding success.

The best part is that Lean thinking is a proven system that scales as large or as small as you need it to be. The likes of Toyota prove this, while other, smaller-scale institutions, like individual hospitals, have also incorporated it into their organizational philosophies with ease.

What Is Lean Thinking?

Originally developed by Toyota in the 1950s, Lean thinking is a strategic approach to improvement that focuses on improving the flow of the value stream and eliminating waste simultaneously. With Toyota, the goal and emphasis were to ensure efficiency in their processes, while still being able to sell their cars at a competitive price.

It’s for this reason that Lean thinking is so popular, as it can translate into ways to speed up manufacturing without sacrificing quality. At least this is the case in manufacturing, but it also has a variety of other use cases, like in healthcare, banking, and education.

At its core, Lean thinking is all about spotting and slashing anything that doesn’t add customer value, like a lengthy sign-in process at a hospital or too many steps to open up a checking account. The hope is that Lean thinkers can take advantage of other business tools like Value Stream Mapping to visually see a flow and make adjustments as necessary to improve both the bottom line and the customer experience.

The goal is that Lean thinking, whether in the classroom or in a hospital, can flip frustrations into flow. This can be a game-changing way of thinking as it’s a smart way to boost efficiency, cut costs, and ramp up the level of satisfaction without adding fancy new equipment. Instead, this is all about taking advantage of smart, human-centered changes.

Lean Thinking and Sector Transformation

There is no question that there are a lot of perfect matches in the business world, and one such case is that of Lean thinking and sector transformation. It’s helpful for everyone to try and think of Lean thinking as something that can be plugged into any industry, in this case, education, finance, and healthcare.

The best reason to choose Lean thinking is that it can be tailored to any industry, and you don’t have to increase a company’s overall lift to get things set up and ready to go. Finding measurable wins, as hinted at above, doesn’t take significant implementation, just a buy-in from stakeholders and a desire to see the bottom line improve.

Better yet, Lean focuses heavily on people, which means that it’s going to help improve culture, which employees at every level should love. It also looks to help turn small tweaks into big overhauls, and these can make the job of employees easier, which nobody should complain about.

Lean thinking has exploded from manufacturing, where it was a dominant idea from its inception until the 1980s, and has now moved into other sectors, where it’s become something of a perfect match. For healthcare, in particular, they have to heavily focus on what makes the most sense for their patients, as the last thing anyone wants is some kind of implementation that puts people at risk.

Every Sector Has Its Own Challenges

While Lean thinking might be somewhat universal in its implementation, each sector, as in those of healthcare, finance, and education, has its own challenges. If you work or have ever been in a healthcare space, you know it’s an endless waiting experience as doctors and nurses run late, paperwork is as high as the ceiling, and miscommunications happen far more often than they should.

In the finance world, employees have to deal with highly detailed compliance concerns, all while potentially working with outdated systems. Of course, the education system needs a giant kick in the rear, as it may be the most behind of all three sectors, and is in desperate need of a revamp.

Whether it’s because of siloed teams, outdated habits, or waste that just continues to balloon in costs unchecked, there is always going to be a challenge in these sectors. However, if organizations can use Lean thinking to try and flip the script, there is an opportunity to not just expose these issues, but tackle them head-on and find the kind of efficiency that helps throw money at the bottom line, all while improving employee retention and morale.

Lean Thinking in Healthcare

Streamlining Patient Flows

In the world of healthcare, there is almost always a need for improvements, for better or worse. The best thing that Lean thinking can do is to try to get rid of healthcare bottlenecks, which often show up as ER waits or sitting in a waiting room 30 minutes after your appointment time.

The goal with Lean thinking is to try to map the patient journey and eliminate any step in the flow that doesn’t create value. The hope is that you can cut down door-to-door times, or from when the patient enters a building to when they leave, by as much as 50%. If you can see wait times drop from one hour to 15 minutes, you are seeing more patients, all while making the patients you are seeing happier.

Measuring wait time, in particular, is a direct tie to patient satisfaction and outcomes, which shorter wait times hopefully translate into fewer errors.

Reducing Errors and Waste

As part of Lean thinking, you might be looking at taking advantage of Kaizen events in a hospital that can target waste. Whether this is looking at things like duplicate tests or something else of similar waste, you can trim errors significantly and save millions in the process.

What about tracking defects? Any errors in testing cost the hospital money for a retest and risk lives in the process. Implementing Lean thinking should go a long way to eliminating the need for retests, which means a hospital is providing better care, which means better healthcare overall and increased patient satisfaction.

Lean Thinking in Finance

Optimizing Transaction Processes

In the finance world, Lean thinking is going to play a big factor in things like loan approvals, which is one of the biggest money generators for banks. Delays in loan approvals can kill a deal as well as a potential customer’s level of trust in a bank. The faster a loan can be processed, or any transaction for that matter, the more likely someone is to commit to repeat business.

Enhancing Compliance and Risk Management

No matter how you look at banking, compliance and risk management are two things you cannot ignore. If you can cut down compliance time on paperwork by even one-third, it’s going to lead to huge boosts in efficiency and passing audits. Organizations track their audit pass rates, which are typically 95% or higher, to feel successful, so this is essential.

Separately, fines are bad, very bad, so Lean thinking is the best way to try and prevent them. The more that can be done to optimize any process, even if it’s just passing paperwork between different departments, the fewer errors that are likely to be found, which in turn directly affects the pass rate on audits.

Lean Thinking in Education

Improving Administrative Efficiency

When you try to consider where Lean thinking fits in the education world, there is no question that even something as simple as enrollment paperwork can free up teachers for classroom time.

Enrollment paperwork might seem like it’s something that requires plenty of time to review, and it does, but even if you can find 20% faster processing, it’s going to help with boosting everything else that a teacher can do to actually plan for classroom work that students can use to learn and feel successful.

Administrative efficiencies are arguably the biggest area where education needs a swift kick to get better. There is far too much paperwork that takes place, and even if teachers can find a way to automate homework, it’s more time that can be given back to planning for the next day to better prepare students for the work ahead.

Personalizing Student Experiences

If you add Kaizen to the mix in schools, you can make tweaks to a curriculum, which means that the following year, teachers are going to be better prepared to teach students the material. Not only that, but they will know how to better quiz or test students on the material, and can even customize a curriculum to best apply the learnings that have been gained from years prior.

There is also an argument to say that schools should give surveys to students, which allows them to add in their own arguments for how their experiences can be personalized. If Lean thinking can add at least 15% personalization to a student’s learning experience, it can cause an 85% lift in learning.

Benefits and Outcomes of Lean Thinking

Let’s assume for a moment that you can get Lean to light up each sector by as much as 20-40% efficiency, which means everything from shorter wait lists in healthcare to quick enrollment in education. The direct result is that costs drop, satisfaction increases, and stakeholders all across the board are happier.

There is also an argument to be made about teams that are thriving with roles that are better defined, and as a result, there is less burnout and turnover. It often goes down to the bottom of the concern pile, but if Lean can help keep employees around, it’s less time and costs a company has to spend to replace employees, which is far costlier than trying to improve the experience for those who are already employed.

Over the long haul, there is no question that Lean thinking is going to build sector leaders, healthcare will be safer, finance will be sharper, and education will be brighter.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

At the end of the day, it’s hard to argue with the benefits of what Lean thinking can bring to the table. Toyota is, in fact, the prime example that illustrates how efficient it can be and how significantly it can improve the bottom line. It’s for this reason that you might want to read all about how the Theory of Constraints compares to Lean and see which of these methodologies is better for your business.

Alternatively, you can keep this topic going by learning all about how hospitals can find a faster patient flow with Lean Six Sigma. Better yet, try this article and read to get to the bottom of what Lean really means for your bottom line.

Conclusion

Lean thinking isn’t a sector snob; this is what makes it so great, as it can be applied to just about every type of business, including healthcare, finance, education, manufacturing, and more. The good news is that it can help streamline daily flows to secure future growth, which is exactly what businesses in all of these sectors want to see from implementing this business methodology.