Provide a detailed response to the following a Does lean pro

Provide a detailed response to the following:

a.) Does lean production work in the service sector? Provide an illustration (example with reasons) to demonstrate your point.

b.) Which lean techiniques work in both the manufacturing and service sector? Are there any which only apply to one or the other (service or manufacturing)?

Solution

a.) Does lean production work in the service sector?

Yes, it also works in service sector, many people think lean just applies to production but this is because waste is usually hidden when it comes to services, you can not see it right away like on production.

An illustration to this is that in a call center we had a known issue where most of our customers were reporting the same issue so we had hundred of tickets about the same problem.

A team of 20 customer service reps were on duty answering the tickets and we were monitoring them to perfom audits. There was a big variation on the process, even though they all knew the answer some employee were 10 times faster than the others becase it was using a standard script or because was using hote keys to increase the speed on his answers.

You need to look for the delays on the processes and eliminate them. They are a waste of time and customers want their service right away.

Which lean techiniques work in both the manufacturing and service sector?

All lean techniques have application in both manufacturing and services. The lean techniques of JIT, layout (work cells), inventory reduction, and tight scheduling have few boundaries

Are there any which only apply to one or the other (service or manufacturing)?

The lean techniques of JIT, layout (work cells), inventory reduction, and tight scheduling have few boundaries and applied mostly to manufacturing.