Is a Lean Business Model For Me?

When you witness production at a print shop, it’s almost like watching a NASCAR pit crew, an offensive line, or maybe even a musical. It’s people working in tandem to get a job done. While they all have different roles, it’s ultimately about winning the race, the game, or the Tony Award.

Similarly, a wide-format shop floor is made up of different moving parts, and the end goal it to make the client happy. And just like a pit crew or a Broadway kick-line, if one thing is off, the whole production gets slowed down. Have you ever looked at your operation and wondered how you can make it more efficient?

That’s where implementing a lean business model comes in. It is a strategy that aims to increase value and minimize waste by improving business operations and processes. And if you’re wondering how this can be applied to a wide-format shop, don’t worry, this article features three lean experts to help walk you through it.

Understanding Lean and its History

To better understand lean, let’s first look at where it originated.

John Compton, Principal of Compton & Associates, says the concept of lean came from an MIT study in the 1980s about the American and Japanese automobile industries.

“It was determined that the Japanese automobile industry was far more profitable, far more efficient, than American manufacturers. So, the study of the Japanese auto manufacturers – Toyota being the principal one of the bunch – discovered that their approach was to minimize the resources and to maximize the output. And minimizing the resources meant minimizing the number of people, minimizing hours, minimizing space. And so, the folks out of MIT, particularly a gentleman by the name of John Krafcik, coined the term lean,” Compton explains.

And with lean, there are actually different ways to approach it. Continuous improvement, for example, involves starting with a problem, creating ownership, and making plans visible. There is also the lean Kaizen Model, which is a strategy that involves employees at all levels of an organization working together to improve processes.

Brian Van De Water, CEO of SPL Consulting, explains the different methods this way: “From a strategic planning perspective, it gives you the ability to come up with how you're going to get change done. Strategic planning is the ‘what am I going to do?’ The Kaizen process focuses on wastes from a lean perspective that are in a system, like wasted time, transportation, touching things multiple times, those kinds of things.”

Where Should You Start?

If you’re wondering how to utilize a lean business process in your shop, or how you should go about getting started, Karen Martin, president and founder of TKMG Academy, says you should start by thinking about value and waste.

“One of the most fundamental concepts that people can easily grasp is value and waste. I think you should also go into it with a clear strategy. Figure out your pain points, whether it’s financial pain, safety issues, high turnover. Once you know what your pain points are, you can use lean tools to help fix them,” Martin says.

Van De Water says that any shops or businesses looking to implement lean should bring in the assistance of a lean consultant. He explains that when he’s brought into a business, he does a deep dive into the everyday operations. He spends about half the week interviewing everyone from the CEO to the press operators, and the other half he spends on-site and does what he calls a “waste walk.”

“I go into these operations and apply a lean tool called a waste walk, where you just go look, and you look for waste, and you talk to people when you see things and ask questions. So, half that time has been spent observing processes, not just manufacturing, but also front-end processes as well,” Van De Water says.

Compton says he does something similar, and recalls an example of when he was at a print shop and noticed four people working on one machine. He pointed out all the motion involved and how it added no value, and eventually got to the root cause of the problem: the piece of equipment needed maintenance and was “jury rigged” so it was running, but running slowly, and causing more unnecessary motion.

To catch situations like this, Compton advises supervisors and managers to simply just observe.

“I’m working with a printing company in Salt Lake City,” Compton says, “and we're requiring them to spend an hour a day looking at only one small operation. And I don't even want them to tell me how they're going to fix it. I just want them to tell me what they see, because that's the first thing. If you can't see it, then you're limited in your ability to improve it.”

Keeping Things Lean

Once you’ve found your pain points and figured out ways to eliminate them, your work is not over. Van De Water warns the the hardest part about lean is sustaining the processes you came up with. He explains that to avoid this, companies need to set aside time after the fact to make sure their new processes are in place and are being utilized.

“I teach my clients that this is really a strategic thing that you've invested in. That you've got to commit some time to it. It may only be a half hour a week is all it takes to set up. [A company may] have a weekly, you know, call it a committee, that's going to follow up on the action items and the verification that standard work is, in terms of new processes, being followed. That's really one of the core things. You've got to keep the focus there, come back to it and validate that those things are happening,” Van De Water says.

If you were to ask Compton and Martin, they’d tell you another key component to keeping lean processes in place is keeping employees engaged and motivated, and that starts with leadership embracing lean concepts and being, says Martin, “champions of philosophy.”

Martin adds that employee engagement is important so every person at your organization can feel like they’re contributing to the continuous improvement of not only their own environment or station, but to the organization.

“I mean, improving is a high and dealing with the same old crap day in and day out is not a high. It's very draining. So, when companies want to attract and retain really good talent, they have to create the environment for people to be attracted to it and want to stay,” Martin says.

Compton says that in addition to fostering a good work environment, leadership should also frame this process as a way to make their employees’ lives better, because waste essentially “steals joy from the workplace.”

“If you give opportunity to solve the problem and make it easier, make the process easier to do, then there's the opportunity for joy, and joy almost always results in better performance,” he adds.

Is Lean for You?

If you believe your operation is doing everything right, then maybe take a waste walk and see what you find – you may be surprised. And curiosity is key: “My feeling is if there were a better way of achieving higher productivity and higher competitive advantage, I'd be interested in it,” Compton says.