Seven Wastes

Introduction

The lean management originated from the manufacturing world more specifically from Toyota's revolution in the sector of manufacturing back in the '80s. Although lean was born in a manufacturing platform, in recent time, lean has transformed the globe of knowledge work as well as management. It greatly encourages the practice of continuous improvement besides building its fundamental code in the fundamental idea of respect for people with the customers’ requirement and taste more especially in the business sector being given the priority. There are five principles associated with lean management which have had greatly brought revolution to the world in recent times. This paper will illustrate how these five lean principles should be implemented in the Illinois State Families and Children Department for efficiency in service delivery (Hicks, McGovern, Prior, & Smith, 2015).

Principles Applied

Although the lean principles have been applied in the Illinois State Families and Children Department, for quite some time now, they have not been effectively exploited since from the main challenges that are being experienced in the Illinois State Families and Children Department; a new person to the organization may suggest that those principles aren't being applied in the organization. This is because the kind of challenges being faced in the Illinois State Families and Children Department can be eliminated by effective utilization of lean principles more specifically in the management section. The five lean principles, in this case, include value definition; value stream mapping, flow creating, pull system utilization, as well as perfection, pursue (Yang et al. 2015).

Value Definition

Value is actually what the customer is willing to pay for; this is from a business point of view. This means that it's much important to identify the exact or even the hidden requirements of the customer since at times the customers might not be in a position of knowing what they specifically want or maybe know what they want but the real articulation of their desires happens to be a challenge. For instance, in the Illinois State Families and Children Department, there is the adoption of waterfall methodology which was followed by what can be termed as unworthy challenges for an organization that is making use of the lean principles. For instance, the organization isn't identifying or rather defining the customer value in the waterfall methodology, and that is why customers had to wait for longer times for the reports to be released since they were rolled out in large amounts. In this case, it has to be noted that the customer value, in this case, is not to roll the reports in a large amount, but the time value. Specifically, by making use of value definition principle, the organization is supposed to roll the reasonable amount of reports whose customers are readily available for saving the customers' time (Jasti, & Kodali, 2016).

Value Stream Mapping

This is the second lean principle which makes use of customer’s value as a reference point towards the identification of all the actions which leads to the valuation of the customer. From this principle, all the activities which don't add value to the receiving end customer are considered as a waste. As per the Illinois State Families and Children Department, this principle can be applied in the number of files the customers handle to access the data or domains that they want. The large documentation of tasks is a waste both in the organization's resources as well as the time of the customers. By making use of Value Stream Mapping, the organization can rethink of adopting the use of technology in documentation as well as handling of data by the customers. This will specifically ensure that all the large documentation of tasks is broken down into small bulk beside the number of files to be handled are greatly reduced. This will save the customers’ time at the same time saving the organization resources from going into a waste (Azadeh, Yazdanparast, Zadeh, & Zadeh, 2017).

Flow Creating

The mapping, as well as value streaming, entails the removal of wastes from the system to remain with only the valuable activities which are beneficial to the customers. The flow of creating a lean principle comes in to ensure that these valuable activities are smoothly running without any disturbance. To ensure that there will be a smooth flow of these activities, departmental tasks for instance in the Illinois State Families and Children Department, is necessary. This will greatly reduce the accumulation of tasks under one desk (Zhou, 2016). The training of the Illinois State Families and Children Department employees to be multi-skilled as well as adoptive will also help in increasing the efficiency of service delivery since any employee can attend the customers adequately without necessarily having to depend on only one or two individuals to perform certain tasks in the whole department. Also, this will help in doing away with instances of inadequate testing of the data warehouse project which lead to misunderstandings. With many multi-skilled employees, the testing process can be taken as a group work hence achieving the results as per the requirements (Orzen, & Bell, 2016).

Pull System Utilization

This is the fourth lean principle which is mandated at regulating the stock in the organization at the same time ensuring that there are adequate raw materials for the continuous production process. This acknowledges the just in time delivery mechanism. In the Illinois State Families and Children Department, this principle can be utilized to allow for instant picking of reports by the customers. This can be achieved through the regulation of the number of reports being rolled in the organization as well as reducing the documentation bulk (Mrugalska, & Wyrwicka, 2017).

Perfection Pursue

This is the last lean principle that can be utilized in the Illinois State Families and Children Department. It should be appreciated that this is the most important principle which must be adhered to if lean management has to have an impact on the organization. The other four principles more specifically deal with wasted elimination from the process, but perfection pursue principle will ensure that lean thinking, as well as the continuous process that is aimed at improvement, is part and parcel of the Illinois State Families and Children Department. Therefore, this principle brings about persistence to lean management (Jasti, & Kodali, 2015).

References:

Azadeh, A., Yazdanparast, R., Zadeh, S. A., & Zadeh, A. E. (2017). Performance optimization of integrated resilience engineering and lean production principles. Expert Systems with Applications, 84, 155-170.

Hicks, C., McGovern, T., Prior, G., & Smith, I. (2015). Applying lean principles to the design of healthcare facilities. International Journal of Production Economics, 170, 677-686.

Jasti, N. V. K., & Kodali, R. (2016). An empirical study for the implementation of lean principles in the Indian manufacturing industry. Benchmarking: An International Journal, 23(1), 183-207.

Jasti, N. V. K., & Kodali, R. (2015). Lean production: literature review and trends. International Journal of Production Research, 53(3), 867-885.

Mrugalska, B., & Wyrwicka, M. K. (2017). Towards lean production in industry 4.0. Procedia Engineering, 182, 466-473.

Orzen, M. A., & Bell, S. C. (2016). Lean IT: Enabling and sustaining your lean transformation. Productivity Press.

Yang, T., Kuo, Y., Su, C. T., & Hou, C. L. (2015). Lean production system design for fishing net manufacturing using lean principles and simulation optimization. Journal of Manufacturing Systems, 34, 66-73.

Zhou, B. (2016). Lean principles, practices, and impacts: a study on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Annals of Operations Research, 241(1-2), 457-474.