Use the Business Model, its OK!

Peter Hines’ Business Model  drives us to think of lean differently. I have been around Lean for the past 20 years. It started off as being map your business to death, implement 5s, have a go at Kanban, then try OEE, then if your still going do Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), the most enlighten of us graduated to supplier bashing demanding price reductions and vendor maintained inventory. We took a very crass journey across the horizontal axis of the business model -value stream mapping tool implementation and then supply chain price reductions.

Sustainable transformation is obviously much more holistic and planned in its approach. The business model shows us that true transformation results from aligning our strategy, engaging our people, use systems and not tools to improve our business, utilise the extended enterprise both to customers and suppliers. Lean is a very simple concept – 5 principles based around engaging our people and applying common sense. It is though, often confused with tools and used in isolation – use Lean to initiate a change in your business, turn your lean programme into your continuous improvement programme and finally admit you are here to work better and deliver more benefit to your employees and customers and then you are onto a winner.