Becoming a Lean organisation starts with Lean thinking
Lean thinking is about changing the focus of management from optimising separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments, to optimising the entire value stream that flows horizontally across the entire organisation and ultimately to the customer. Lean organisations focus on eliminating waste along entire value stream, instead of at isolated points, developing processes that need less human effort, less capital, and less time to deliver products and services with far fewer defects and at a much lower cost.
But lean is much more than a methodology for eliminating waste. It is about creating a culture of continuous improvement and leadership approach that can completely transform how your organisation operates. Dynamic work-flow and process optimisation are what has been described as the next wave of evolution in becoming a Lean organisation. Although technology such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) are certainly playing a key role in decreasing the chance of human error, and can perform repetitive tasks at lighting speed, fundamental process analytics and dynamic work-flow design remain the cornerstones of process optimisation. In other words; simply automating a pour process will only produce errors at a faster rate. Optimisation can only happen with good process design.