How to Implement an Operational Efficiency and Strategic Lean Plan?
We implement Lean Durable® methods to design and roll out customized operational efficiency plans aligned with your strategic priorities. Our approach is based on eliminating waste, optimizing processes, and engaging teams to create added value at every stage of your value chain.
By combining methodological rigor with practical, on-the-ground expertise, we support you in transforming your operations to improve productivity, reduce costs, and enhance agility, while embedding a culture of continuous improvement at the heart of your organization.
Part of the Lean Durable®, Strategic Lean will help you structure your (Hoshin Hoshin Kanrimatrix) and define your priority projects—cultural and economic projects in line with your top strategic priorities.
What is the purpose of an operational efficiency plan?
Operational efficiency is much more than just a cost-cutting initiative: it is a fundamental transformation that directly impacts your competitiveness and your ability to innovate. The goal of these efficiency plans is to implement immediate actions that deliver rapid results, yet have lasting effects to address the organization’s challenges.
Achieve Economic Gains
By eliminating waste, optimizing resources, and increasing productivity:
- Eliminating waste: According to Lean principles, up to 30% of the costs in a process are associated with activities that do not add value (overhead, overproduction, unnecessary inventory, etc.). In manufacturing, for example, reducing work-in-process inventory can free up significant amounts of working capital.
- Optimize resources: by reallocating resources (people, machinery, space) to high-value-added activities.
- Increase productivity: by improving the efficiency of production lines or teams, in order to produce more with the same resources and the same available space.
Save time
By streamlining processes, reducing production lead times, and improving responsiveness:
- Streamlining processes: by eliminating bottlenecks and redundant steps (for example, by automating tests in IT systems to reduce time to production).
- Reduce production lead times: using tools such as SMED (Single-Minute Exchange of Dies ), which reduces changeover times, or VSM (Value Stream Mapping) to identify and eliminate wait times.
- Improving responsiveness: by developing agility to respond more quickly to customer requests or market changes.
Improving Quality
By standardizing best practices and reducing errors:
- Standardize best practices by documenting and disseminating the most effective methods (e.g., checklists, standard operating procedures) in order to reduce variability and human error.
- Reduce errors: using tools such as Poka-Yoke or regular quality audits, and implementing simple visual checks.
- Involving teams: Total Quality Management (TQM) relies on everyone’s commitment to identifying and correcting the root causes of nonconformities.
Enhancing Agility
By making your organization more responsive to changes and customer requests:
- Making the organization more responsive: by breaking down silos and improving communication between departments through the implementation of team rituals to speed up decision-making.
- Anticipating changes: through flexible planning tools (e.g., Kanban, Scrum) and active strategic monitoring.
- Adapting to customer demands: by implementing flexible processes to reduce the time it takes to launch a new product or service, thereby responding more quickly to customer needs.
Use Strategic Lean to Improve Your Operational Performance
- Developing Your Strategic Matrix with Your Executive Team : aligning your 3- to 5-year vision, your annual goals, your priority projects, your KPIs, and your associated resources,
- Design and facilitation of your company’s command center : defining your executive team’s routine, providing day-to-day coaching for the executive team,
- Facilitating your strategic projects,
- Deployment across your various departments.
A Few Golden Rules for Prioritizing and Successfully Executing Your Strategic Projects :
Rule No. 1:
Your strategic roadmap should fit on a single A3 sheet… in 8-point (mini) font ! This will automatically prevent you from listing all 50 projects you’d like to undertake and force you to prioritize!
Rule No. 2:
Make sure your strategic projects are aligned with your objectives. How often do we undertake projects that ultimately fail to meet our objectives and therefore have no impact on our performance metrics? !
Rule No. 3 :
Involve your management teams in selecting at a very early stage : this ensures discussion, decision-making, and meaningful outcomes for them !
Rule No. 4 :
Spread out your projects evenly throughout the year and keep track of the resources allocated to them so as not to overburden your teams !
Rule No. 5 :
Set aside a few minutes each week to manage your strategic projects. This will allow you to quickly identify any issues, which will be easier to resolve. and prevent schedule slippages!
