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Vol 32 - No 06 - September 2006 Editorial : Welcome to this edition of control In this edition we will explore the use of Lean and other Operations Management thinking in non-manufacturing sectors. In terms of Lean, I am beginning to wonder if the whole world hasn’t gone compleLEAN mad – techniques that were once the preserve of production engineers working on the shopfloor in a few manufacturing sectors have migrated into a broad range of environments and this expansion is set to continue. In manufacturing, having been used to drive up the production performance of whole supply chains, Lean techniques started migrating off the shopfloor into the office functions (sales, stores, procurement etc) and also took on a more strategic focus – including treating Lean as a process for mapping the future of the business rather than purely undertaking improvements through ‘point Kaizen’ events and particular value streams (although these do remain highly beneficial to business). Non-manufacturing sectors are now rapidly adopting Lean techniques. Indeed, the rapidity of the spread of Lean is amazing – in the last year or so alone I have been asked to work on Lean programmes with the RAF, Army, Local Authorities and the NHS, as well as a number of service sector organisations. These non-traditional Lean sectors will benefit from the accumulated knowledge that has been gained in manufacturing and hopefully will be able to avoid the many pitfalls that organisations have fallen into and which has contributed to a sizeable proportion of Lean programmes in manufacturing being unsustainable, particularly the ‘ram raid’ type that focuses purely on the tools. Running alongside the broad adoption of Lean into nonmanufacturing sectors is the expansion of other operations management thinking – such as S&OP, Process Planning and Scheduling into these same sectors, and even the adoption of IT processes that have for years driven manufacturing are now being used to plan everything from the resources required to manage commercial airline flights to theatre capacity in the NHS. One of the biggest challenges for these non-manufacturing sectors as they start to introduce new types of operations thinking is to be able to translate ‘manufacturing speak’ and manufacturing tools to fit their specific needs and the relevant language they use, something which is already starting to show a healthy return on investment as we will see in this edition of Control. Mark Eaton, FIOM Related Topics:
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