Lean formed it's region in manufacturing with the Toyota. But with time the lean approach also spread to services. But believe me, it would be a mistake to do a simple copy and past from lean manufacturing to service. Applying 5s to your desk or kanban to office supply might sound nice and fun. But frankly, it is not critical. Manufacturing and servicing share lean principles. And also, a lot of tools, as you can see. However, they correspond to completely different contexts. Therefore, you will need to understand the key differences to applying lean tools in the most effective way in each context. I would like to highlight the four key differences between the context of manufacturing and service. First, waste and value creation are quiet visible in the manufacturing, but almost invisible in services. In manufacturing, bottlenecks and idle times are easy to notice because they have a visual consequence. For example a pile of parts, all operators waiting. In service though, they are difficult to notice, since value creation and waste are mainly driven by data flow, and often hidden in PCs or servers. Often, the only clue about the existence of a bottleneck is when employees complain about the workload. Idle times are also invisible, because employees are sitting in front of their PC. And in that case, of course, employees do not complained. That's why it will be essential to leverage the value stream mapping in services, in order to visualize bottlenecks and idle times. Second, manufacturing processes generally do not imply interaction with customers. While service processes imply frequent interaction with customers. For example, if you take a phone manufacturer, customers don't get to tell the factory workers how they would like their phone assembled or packaged. On the contrary, if we take a bank, customers will need many meetings and phone calls with their banking agent to get the credit. Manufacturing processes are not directly part of a customer journey. Only directly via the experience of the produced good. In services, the process is the product. So employee activities have a great impact on the customer journey. The third main difference between manufacturing and service is the variety of the human capital. That is to say, employees diversity in terms of skills and qualifications. In manufacturing, human capital variety can range from specialized to generalist operators, or from teams to their team leaders or supervisors. But in service, human capital is much more diverse, and mixes activities of all types. Clerical, administrative, commercial, engineering, up to CO level. So it will be obviously more challenging to apply concepts like standardization in the context of services. The fourth difference is that the manufacturing relies mostly on machines. Whereas, the service rely mostly on IT systems. The equivalent of a manufacturing working station is often an IT tool in services. With the same challenges on economy and optimization of activities. Yet, the context is clearly different. Because IT tools are often off the shelf with little possibility to make a quick modifications. As a consequence, if you want to apply the lean approach in services, we recommend the following. Make sure that you dedicate enough time to expose waste by using the values stream mapping, work load the balance sheets, and works. Foster cooperations and autonomy to make sure that the employees can serve clients effectively. It makes me mad when I hear someone saying, it was not me, it is my colleague's fault. When you look at the value stream, always consider the human capital waste. An engineer should spend the majority of his time to design. A sales representative should spend the majority of his time with customers. Use rapid IT prototyping, such as data workflow configurators. Or mock up the IT support for your ideas of improvement. You should not stick to a traditional IT change journey since it would slow the momentum.
