InterQuality is a trusted partner for supporting companies in Bulgaria and Europe to advance their journey to operational excellence. Lean consulting is focused on implementing lean practices and lean thinking to operational and production processes.
Lean consulting covers a variety of areas where we will support your company
• Lean consulting focuses on partnering with the management team to assess areas for improvement
• Work across organisational levels and support the teams in clarifying objectives for lean implementation, focusing and guiding their efforts
• Lean consulting assists with implementing culture and awareness of lean methods
• Training on lean tools based on skills analysis and needs of the enterprise is one of the top benefits of lean consulting
• Lean consulting efforts are focused on improving workflow and processes
• Lean consulting supports the teams with solving specific problems and establishing sustainable controls
• Lean consulting focuses on building skillset in teams to use lean tools in future
• Lean consulting supports your organisation to encourage a lean way of working and implement lean daily management practices
Key benefits of Lean Consulting
• Improved awareness of lean methods and culture of continuous improvement
• Better process flows
• Process clarity
• Focus on value adding activities
• Reduced costs
• Roles and responsibilities clarity
• Boost in employee morale and engagement
• Building sustainable employee and management skills on deploying lean methods
Lean Consulting in Production
Lean Consulting for production assists companies with reviewing and optimising the flow and output of processes related to product design, manufacturing, logistics, warehousing, and overall supply chain management from customer order to delivery of the final product.
Lean Consulting helps companies build awareness of lean thinking and lean methods among employees and promoting a new and more efficient way of working. Working towards building a culture of continuous improvement, Lean Consulting assists in the journey of transforming organisation culture starting from operators to middle and top management.
Taking advantage of Lean Consulting helps get a professional support in identifying non-value-adding activities and working to improve the process flow. With a consultant on your side, you get additional hands-on training on applicable tools that help you resolve issues and improve further.
Lean Consulting in Services
Lean Consulting for the service sector presents an opportunity to critically review processes across the business and work on promoting the continuous improvement mind-set and transforming organisational culture. Although lean methodology originated in manufacturing, it is already for decades the ‘go-to’ method for companies that wish to stand out on the market as best-in-class performers.
Implementing lean principles helps optimise progressively operational processes. The principles of flow, takt time, Kanban, 5S, visual management are equally useful for service related processes as they are for manufacturing. With the help of a lean professional your efforts will be guided through applicable lean management practices after careful assessment of your needs and gaps you wish to close as a result of using lean consulting.
Another area where lean consulting will help is building a lean management system that yields remarkable results in transforming operations. Some of the immediate benefits are process clarity and clear roles and responsibilities, more transparent and fast workflow. Lean consulting promotes daily management practices including visual management and visual controls that help build the visibility needed to detect problems and work towards constructive resolutions, day by day of smaller or bigger issues. With lean consulting, people engagement is increased as a result of role clarity. Back-up planning and cross-training employees have
a positive impact on securing uninterrupted flow of activity and flexibility to changes in customer demand, and lean consulting can help you with this.
Symptoms that your organisation needs Lean Consulting
Symptom 1: There are confusions and conflicting points on who should do what
Lean Consulting assists in clarifying the process and from there what are the relevant responsibilities of each employee.
Symptom 2: There are differences in how people think a process works
Lean Consulting helps your team come up with a single version of the process and clears off all the differences in perception. As a result, there is one standard way of working.
Symptom 3: Large number of rework, fixes and iterations
Through Lean Consulting you receive professional support in critically reviewing your processes and identifying wastes and points of failure
Symptom 4: High operational costs
High operational costs are a clear symptom that the processes contain different types of waste and multiple non-value adding activities. With Lean Consulting you will have a partner to review processes and also support you in financial analysis of these costs as well as potential return on investment from fixing them. Lean consulting assists with this analysis to provide you with the full picture of the costs and investment needed to close that gap.
Symptom 5: Lack of end-to-end view of how the information and materials from among the teams
Lean consulting helps build a clear end-to-end view of how the information and materials flow across the organisation and the different touchpoints in teams as a first steps in the so-called Value stream analysis. By performing value analysis of the process, lean consulting helps the team uncover non-value adding activities that prevent the process flowing smoothly and delivering as a final output the desired product or service as per customer requirements. As an additional benefit of lean consulting, teams are trained in value analysis so that they build the skillset to implement best practices in their work going forward.
Symptom 6: Limited or no process documentation
Process documentation including but often not limited to Standard Operating Procedures, process notes, work instructions, etc. capture the standard to which the process must be performed. It contains detailed information on the process flow, roles and responsibilities (RACI), process performance measures, risks and mitigations, links to other processes, process owner and other critical process information. Lean consulting will assist in establishing one standard way of working that clarifies who owns the process, also roles and links between employees and departments. Lean consulting helps establish process standards and build the necessary documentation.
Symptom 7: Actions implemented so far do not yield the desired results
Despite ongoing efforts to improve the processes, the organisation keeps struggling with reoccurring process issues. If this is the case, you can benefit from lean consulting. Problems require deep analysis and knowledge on possible approaches to ensure they can be resolved from the root cause and there you need lean consulting. Ensuring sustainability after such initiatives is equally critical in order to ensure controls are in place to permanently resolve the situation. If your organisation has tried multiple approaches that do not yield positive results, it is then time to get lean consulting support. Apart from the assistance your organisation will receive on resolving current issues, lean consulting will get your team trained in problem solving skills and related lean and six sigma tools to be used independently in future. Lean consulting also builds this capability for organisations that have continuous improvement at the heart of what they do.
Symptom 8: Lack of process thinking
Building process thinking takes time if left to ‘trial-and-error’ way of working. Lean consulting has proven methodology to build process thinking and process culture in organisations.
Symptom 9: Unable to meet targets or meeting targets but operations are still generating losses
The strength of quality methodologies, such as lean and six sigma, is in ensuring a consistent approach in understanding and measuring performance. Performance metrics are set after process analysis and are linked to the process structure. By utilising lean consulting expertise, organisations receive support in building an aligned process and metrics structure that promotes consistent measurements and reliable performance analysis.
Symptom 10: Desire to improve processes and ways of working
In order to utilise lean consulting as an option to improve organisational performance to its full potential, your organisation should be willing to take the next step. Lean consulting offers great opportunities to do so. Management support is critical in this journey and lean consulting can help shape the future of your organisation in the best possible way.
For more information on Lean Consulting, please contact us on
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Lean Consulting
Lean Consulting in Production
Lean Consulting in Services
Symptoms that your organisation needs Lean Consulting