Lean Government
Lean Industries Series
Topics
• What is Lean?
• What is Lean Government?
• Why Lean Government?
• Benefits of Lean Government
• Lean Government Strategies
• Barriers to Lean’s Success in Government
• Summary
What is Lean Thinking?
Value
Empowered
People
Value
Stream
Perfection
Flow &
Pull
Benefits of Lean Government?
• Lean focuses on operations – rethink the way we produce
public services to increase our capacity to provide value to the
public
▫ Lean recognizes that inefficiency resides in our systems and
our operations – the way we have designed our work
▫ Lean actually focuses on the work of the government agency
• Lean has a measurable impact on time, capacity and
customer satisfaction
▫ Lean projects produce results and they are typically 80% faster
than a traditional process
▫ 50% drop in customer wait-times – doubling capacity – reducing
phone calls and saving cost
Lean Government Strategies
• There are 8 workable Lean strategies for
governments seeking to reduce waste and become
more efficient
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Synchronization to Customer Demands
Understand Variations in Customer Demand
Create Work Cells
Eliminate Batching Work and Multi-Tasking
Enforce First in, First out
Implement Standardized Work and Load Leveling
Do Today’s Work Today
Make the Value Stream Visible
Chew Jian Chieh, Valeocon Management Consulting
Lean Government Strategies
3. Create Work Cells
• Governments generally use registry process
▫ The key feature of Lean work cells is the training of multiskilled and flexible workers
▫ In a lean work cell, the goal is to have all workers trained to a
level where everyone can perform the job at every workstation
▫ If everyone can do every job, processes are never left half
finished
Chew Jian Chieh, Valeocon Management Consulting
Barriers to Success
• The industrial jargon is a turn-off
▫ The Lean terminology of waste, value stream, Toyota
Production System, supply-chain and 5S isn’t simplifying
the need to implement Lean thinking
▫ The Lean concepts can have an impact on government
performance only if the people in government believe in
the concepts
▫ The more we obfuscate helpful concepts with industrialage terminology, the more barriers we put up to
achieving change
Summary
Lean is about identifying and reducing waste, by thinking
about how we do our jobs while focusing on the customer's
needs and eliminating waste.
It is about many, small improvements that lead to an overall
significant change for the better on how we operate.
It is about using the intuition and common sense of the
people who do the job to find ways to do it better.