How Lean is your business?

It’s a question that many people aren’t prepared to answer, and there’s two primary reasons why:

  • They’re unfamiliar with the Lean methodology
  • Their processes are too complex to qualify

Here’s the solution to the first problem: the Lean methodology is a tool used to streamline your production processes, and the concept is actually very simple. Your goal, as a business, is to create value for your customers. To achieve that goal, you’ve created processes and systems. But are those processes running as efficiently as possible? To find out, break the processes down into steps, and ask yourself, “Can I cut out any of these steps without sacrificing the value this process is creating?”

That’s Lean.

The second problem is a bit trickier. That’s the problem Promapp is trying to solve.

Lean Tagging Tool

Promapp is a leading provider of cloud-based business process management (BPM) software. Instead of thick binders and old, worn out manuals that detail your business processes, Promapp has created a tool that stores all processes in a central online repository. Process owners, like you, can view and dynamically edit business processes with a few clicks of the mouse.

It gives you a clear, bird’s-eye view of your processes from beginning to end, and makes it easy to spot redundancies, inconsistencies and other inefficiencies. And with the addition of a new function called Lean Tagging, the tool became even stronger.

Lean Tagging allows users to look at a process, select any step of that process, and label it. It doesn’t sound like much, but Lean Tagging is creating powerful, meaningful change for processes.

Lean & BPM

“Right now, there is a disconnect between business improvement and Lean thinking,” said Ivan Seselj, CEO of Promapp, in a press release. “We have these terms and labels that we apply to improvement but they are passive language only. Lean thinking needs to be totally engaged with process, it needs to be visual and it needs to be easy to use so that organizations can drive innovation and continuous improvement, and then promote track, identify and report on improvement opportunities and benefits.”

Picture this—you think you’ve trimmed a process down to its essential steps, but you open the BPM tool, and you notice that four other users have labelled a step as “inefficient” or “redundant.” They’re providing a perspective that you don’t have, and at the very least, that label is starting a conversation about what’s necessary and what’s not.

It’s Lean via democracy. It’s a multitude of individuals thinking about process improvement in many unique and interesting ways, and offering their opinion on how to make things better.

“The hunt for continual improvement encourages everyone to identify new ways to reduce resource usage, develop and deliver products faster, at a higher quality and at a lower cost,” Seselj added. “At the same time, it encourages creative input from the people responsible for carrying out the work with a management process which engenders improvement. All of this means that within lean organizations, processes cannot be static. They are dynamic, constantly changing and therefore, must be managed through Lean tagging.”