Lean Thinking

What is Lean Thinking?

Lean thinking is an established method that helps to streamline entrepreneurial activities and focus on the essentials. Lean Thinking conveys a way of thinking and working that questions the given in processes and procedures and breaks with routines and paradigms.

What does Lean Thinking involve?

Lean thinking relies on central levers to design and accompany a change process in the organisation. The focus is on the basics of lean processes as well as the moderation and organisation of lean events and workshops. In addition, central framework conditions for successful planning and implementation of optimisation projects are considered.

Lean Thinking addresses selected approaches of lean management in a motivating and entertaining format. Based on a concrete company situation, the participants are brought into an active role and together they reflect on challenges in daily business.

The participants work through the situation with the help of targeted tools and methods of Lean Management and thus adopt a new perspective:

• Visualise processes, depict complexity
• Visualise value flows, learn to understand material and information flows
• Identify and evaluate waste in processes
• Design work areas efficiently and focus on the essentials
• Recognising and evaluating bottlenecks and problem areas in processes
• Evaluate activities, interruptions, changes, etc.
• Avoiding errors and making processes error-proof

Exemplary tools that can give participants a new perspective:

• Makigami
• Value stream diagrams
• 5S/ 6S approaches and principles
• Value-added and waste analysis, TIMWOODS approach and principles
• Interface analysis, bottleneck analysis
• Optimising set-up times/ SMED approach
• Error prevention (Poka-Yoke)

What are the advantages of Lean Thinking?

The need for lean, agile and waste-free processes always leads to changes in the organisation. Different ways of thinking and working, attitudes and motivations come together in a deliberate process of change. Lean thinking focuses both on the fundamentals of designing low-waste processes and on relevant problem-solving methods.

There is a consistent focus on value creation and worthless tasks such as unproductive meetings or unnecessary waiting times are eliminated.