LEAN MANAGEMENT – What is it?

Imagine that you go out to buy groceries, and in the process you have to send a letter in the mail. At the store, you find that you don’t have enough cash, and card payments are not accepted.

So you go out in search of an ATM, return to the store, make the necessary purchases, and on your way back you enter the post office, where it turns out that you didn’t take the letter from home. Since the matter must be dealt with today, and you have little time left, you don’t walk home, but take the bus. You leave your shopping, take the letter, take the bus again to the post office, where in the meantime a queue has formed, you stand in it for a quarter of an hour, then run home, because the plumber is due to come in a moment, and you wonder when the time got away….

Do you know such days? What do you think about your time management then? Let’s recap this unfortunate outing: a forgotten letter and a lack of cash in the wallet made everything take twice as long and bus tickets had to be bought. Of course, everything worked out in the end, but it could have been done faster, better and more efficiently.

While in the above example the losses due to the lack of coordination of activities are small, on an enterprise scale each unnecessary transport, additional storage costs or inefficiently used time of employed people entails huge costs. These are not necessary expenses, so – calling a spade a spade – they are losses resulting from mismanagement or waste. And it takes really little to improve the management of a company and its structure and not generate unnecessary costs.
So for the needs of companies, a methodology called Lean Management was invented. It is a technique for managing an organization that first analyzes what is happening in the various operational fields, then – to reduce all unnecessary inputs.

The concept of Lean Management first asks what you want to achieve.

  • Then, how do you do it.
  • Finally: why take so long and why so expensive.

But most importantly: Lean Management specialists, together with the company’s management and employees, by answering these questions, can offer solutions that are effective for the situation, an implementation plan and assistance in carrying it out. The challenge is worth taking on!