Lean services

Lean services is the application of lean manufacturing production methods in the service industry (and related method adaptations). Lean services have among others been applied to US health care providers and the UK HMRC.

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Services
Lean principles have been successfully applied to various sectors and services, such as call centers and healthcare. In the former, lean's waste reduction practices have been used to reduce handle time, within and between agent variation, accent barriers, as well as attain near perfect process adherence. In the latter, several hospitals have adopted the idea of lean hospital, a concept that priorizes the patient, thus increasing the employee commitment and motivation, as well as boosting medical quality and cost effectiveness.

Lean principles also have applications to software development and maintenance as well as other sectors of information technology (IT). More generally, the use of lean in information technology has become known as Lean IT. Lean methods are also applicable to the public sector, but most results have been achieved using a much more restricted range of techniques than lean provides.

The challenge in moving lean to services is the lack of widely available reference implementations to allow people to see how directly applying lean manufacturing tools and practices can work and the impact it does have. This makes it more difficult to build the level of belief seen as necessary for strong implementation. However, some research does relate widely recognized examples of success in retail and even airlines to the underlying principles of lean. Despite this, it remains the case that the direct manufacturing examples of 'techniques' or 'tools' need to be better 'translated' into a service context to support the more prominent approaches of implementation, which has not yet received the level of work or publicity that would give starting points for implementors. The upshot of this is that each implementation often 'feels its way' along as must the early industrial engineering practices of Toyota. This places huge importance upon sponsorship to encourage and protect these experimental developments.

Lean management is nowadays implemented also in non-manufacturing processes and administrative processes. In non-manufacturing processes is still huge potential for optimization and efficiency increase. -->

History
Definition of "Service": see Service, Business Service and/or Service Economics. Lean Services history, see Lean manufacturing.

Lean manufacturing and Services, contrasted by Levitt; "Manufacturing looks for solutions inside the very tasks to be done... Service looks for solutions in the performer of the task." (T.Levitt, Production-Line Approach to Service, Harvard Business Review, September 1972).

Method
Underlying method; Lean manufacturing.

Bicheno & Holweg provides an adapted view on waste for the method ("waste", see Lean manufacturing, waste and The Toyota Way, principle 2):
 * 1) Delay on the part of customers waiting for service, for delivery, in queues, for response, not arriving as promised.
 * 2)  Duplication. Having to re-enter data, repeat details on forms, copy information across, answer queries from several sources within the same organisation.
 * 3)  Unnecessary Movement. Queuing several times, lack of one-stop, poor ergonomics in the service encounter.
 * 4)  Unclear communication, and the wastes of seeking clarification, confusion over product or service use, wasting time finding a location that may result in misuse or duplication.
 * 5) Incorrect inventory. Being out-of-stock, unable to get exactly what was required, substitute products or services.
 * 6)  An opportunity lost to retain or win customers, a failure to establish rapport, ignoring customers, unfriendliness, and rudeness.
 * 7)  Errors in the service transaction, product defects in the product-service bundle, lost or damaged goods.
 * 8)  Service quality errors, lack of quality in service processes.

Shillingburg and Seddon separately provides an additional type of waste for the method:
 * 1) Value Demand, services demanded by the customer. Failure Demand, production of services as a result of defects in the upstream system.

Criticism
John Seddon outlines challenges with Lean Services in his paper "Rethinking Lean Service" (Seddon 2009) using examples from the UK tax-authorities HMRC.