Maximizing the Approach to "Lean Enterprise" Initiatives

Day after day across the globe, small and medium-sized enterprises are looking for ways to balance budgets while also simultaneously stimulating innovation. But perhaps unsurprisingly, being asked to “do more with less” is a major challenge for these organizations—particularly as citizens’ demand for delivery of services increases.

We are now seeing fundamental changes in how the private sector operates, culminating in the emergence of “lean enterprise.” As an improvement philosophy, being “lean” is about eliminating non-value-added activity or “waste”—essentially finding and implementing new methods to reduce the complexity of business operations, by streamlining structures and processes.

By identifying and removing unnecessary process steps and activities, private industry not only gain better transparency into how their processes work—they can make modifications to ensure those processes function smoothly and consistently, thereby improving interactions with clients and stakeholders.

In this session, participants learned the four key components that maximize Lean Enterprise, including how to:

• Create the ideal customer service experience to optimize value delivered to the client and other stakeholders.
• Involve and leverage employees and stakeholders for continual improvements and problem-solving.
• Significantly reduce the complexity of processes and variation in process outputs.
• Leverage performance metrics and visual controls to provide rapid feedback to improve real-time decision-making and problem-solving.