Linking your lean journey toward striving for operational excellence should be one of the organization’s key goals.  When done properly, it will ensure operational discipline leading to long-term impacts to overall performance and growth.  Operational discipline is a key component to operational excellence that, when done right, takes years to develop and engrain into the company’s culture.  Operational discipline can develop over time through kaizen activities and standard work.

The purpose of the kaizen activities is to identify and fix broken systems first.  Once a new system has been put in place, the standard work should include checks to ensure there is no back sliding into the old ways of operating.  The success comes when everyone understands and tracks daily operations to the ‘critical few’ items that are essential for continuing the process of pursuing operational excellence.

Proper standards should reduce variations which lead to inefficiencies, while better standards should prevent potential safety hazards.  Great standards allow employees to feel real ownership in their processes, thus charging a flow of new ideas and leading to a stronger team based upon the team’s interdependency.  

It is here that the lean culture allows a team to further develop ongoing enhancements to the work rhythm, ensuring a seamless flow to daily improvement to standards.   When you have such a system in place, when employees feel they can rely upon each other to not only follow the system but challenge each other, you now have an effective lean culture leading to operational excellence.

To read more about MAU’s lean business practices, click here.