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Lean is a facilitative system where you engage all the employees in the organization. Lean is a whole system about how to create a structure in company, how to measure the performance, how to engage people and how to really drive business forward.

«As for the way Lean programs work, Lean is a very unique system», – says Julia Novik, Innovation Coach, Founder, Lean Practice Group. «It is a facilitative system where you engage all the employees in the organization.»

«We come to the company. We first bring your staff into a room for training,» – she explained how Lean process works. «And what that training involves is really getting them engaged, to open up, to understand how to identify inefficiencies in their daily work and to really share with everybody around where some of the problems reside. We find by engaging employees, we are able to right away generate for the company a hundred improvements of the inefficiencies that were identified by their staff. Then we train employees on Lean principles, tools and how other companies in similar sector apply it.»

Once training is done, it allows to go into operation and start doing what they call «Walk the process». Which is getting step by step of were customer orders come in to every step of the way of production, finishing goods, quality checks, sales process to see how business works. «Employees are basically the ones who coach us along the way, because they know best how your business operates and we learn it through their eyes and through what’s happening on daily basis,» – says Julia Novik.

«Once we’re able to do that, we can create what we call «Value stream map», which allows you to see your whole business from beginning to an end through visual map in which we’ll be able to help you to break down all your different sections, processes, show you how efficient or inefficient you are in terms of the time, defects, many different criteria that you run your business,» – explains the next step the Founder of Lean Practice Group. «The next thing we will do, we’ll bring your management team together into the room and we help to identify, together with you, what is your vision, what is the goal and direction for the company and what are the Key Performance Indicator’s (KPI’s), how do you manage your business, how do you know that your plant is efficient, what do you use to measure that success rate, how do you know that you’re accomplishing your sales and your customers are happy with your services and your product. So we go through that exercise with you and your team to make sure that you know how to best manage your business through those KPI’s.»

Once those KPI’s have been organized, it becomes much easier for leader and teams to know what they are trying to work towards. Now it’s easier to set the targets for teams at all levels of the organization.

«We can create visual maps, what we call «Visual White Boards», where people can see what the targets are, where people can track where they at, if they achieving them, if they’re not and they identify reasons and problems why they may be having challenges,» – she concludes. «Ultimately, Lean is a whole system about how to create a structure in your company, how to measure the performance, how to engage your people and how to really drive your business forward.»