2026 Lean Guide- Tools to Improve Any Process-Cut Waste, Improve Quality, Drive Results

1. Course Overview Lean Six Sigma Made Simple: This course is designed to teach you how to improve the process, cut waste, improve quality, and drive results. Course overview, whether you are a professional looking to streamline your work or a team leader aiming to improve your performance or simply someone who is curious about how processes can be made more efficient, you are at the right place. Hi, I'm Dimple Sangui, and I'm excited to guide you through this practical hands on course that has been specifically designed using the principles of lean sex Sigma. We have made the course accessible and actionable for everyone. No jargons, no bluff, real tools, real insights and real results. So what exactly is an sex sigma? It's a powerful methodology that combines lean which focuses on eliminating waste and maximizing value. With Six Sigma, we aim to reduce variation and improve quality. Together, they form a structured approach for problem solving that can be applied to virtually any process in any industry. And here's the good news. You don't need to be a statistician or have years of experience to start using these tools. In this course, we have made it easy by breaking down the core concepts into easy to understand bit size lessons. These are supported by real life examples, actionable tools that can be used immediately. Over the next series of lessons, we will focus on eight classic types of waste. These are commonly hidden from the plain sight. Drains, time, money, and energy from your work. You will learn how to identify, analyze, and eliminate them. We will work through the transportation waste, which is unnecessary movement of material or people. Inventory waste is the excess took files or data that sits, but nobody uses it. Motion waste is the inefficient actions that add no values. Weighting waste is the ideal time caused by delays or bottlenecks in the process. Overproduction is making more than needed or making it too soon. Overprocessing waste is about doing more than what the customer requires. Defect is an error that needs rework and causes customer dissatisfaction. And the most important, the talent waste. When people's skill and creativity are underutilized, it causes a biggest loss to the organization. Each lesson is short, sharp, and focused. By the end of this course, you will not only recognize waste, you will know exactly what to do about it. We will also have the chance to apply what we have learned in the final project that helps you improve the real process from your work or your daily life. Please ensure that you submit your project and the detailed instruction is given in the lesson there. Whether you want to reduce the customer response time, or you are reducing the errors in the report, or you are organizing your inbox, every improvement counts. And throughout, we will share practical tips, downloadable templates, and plenty of examples to make sure that you are not just learning but taking actions. So are you ready to simplify, streamline and succeed? Let's get started. I will see you inside the class. The next class is to dive into the first module introduction to the types of waste. 2. Online Delivery: Is it fast or is it efficient? Why, business is not the same as customer value. Speed motion hassle. Looks impressive, right? 8:15 A.M. Route four, the driver is ready to go. Stop. Lo inside. Boxes are scattered on the ground, warehouse is overflowing, orders are sitting untouched. 10:00 A.M. Warehouse floor. 11:30 A.M. At customers home. Wrong item delivered. One order never arrived. Complaint begins to come in. The core question, is this process efficient or is it just fast? Is it speed or is it impact? The common organizational trap, mistaking motion for progress, optimizing the delivery speed while ignoring the internal chaos. The lean lens helps us to see enough of waste and fix the flow. So the principle number one is internal success is not equal to customer satisfaction. KPI dashboard at an individual level says that the target is met. Delivery is delayed, package is damaged because the customer experiences late delivery, damaged packet or incorrect package, and we are feeling we successfully deliver 1,000 packages today. The insight is success is defined by the customer experience, not by the internal celebration. Waste is often invisible to the team. What this team sees versus what they don't see, half filled loads, waiting, rework and lost orders. Waiting, waiting, overwork, rework, overproduction. These are the things which are invisible, and an makes them visible. We want efficient flow automation, and we want less of defects. Customer journey is the one journey we should focus on the gap between the order place and the order delivered. So to the customer, it doesn't matter which department did that. They only feel flow or friction. The insight is we don't optimize part, we optimize the end to end flow. Where are we celebrating the output but missing the flow? Have you experienced a service that looks efficient internally, but feels frustrated at the customer end? Weighting waste, motion waste, defects, over processing, poor handoffs, are the different types of waste or the pain we experience. The shift is Len invites us to stop looking at isolated steps, examine the entire value stream from the customer's point of view. AI helps you analyze a pattern. Len teaches us what really matters, customer value without waste. Um, 3. History of Lean: Let's quickly see a video. I'll ask you four questions from this video, please observe it carefully. Great. Welcome to the history of lean thinking. Whilst elements of lean thinking can be traced over hundreds of years, we'll start in an arsenal in the Italian city of Venice. Established in 1104, the arsenal built warships for the Venetian Navy. Over time, the Venetians adopted a standard design for the hundreds of galleys built each year to campaign in the Mediterranean and also pioneered the use of interchangeable parts, which will come in too soon. This made it possible to assemble galleys along a narrow channel running through the arsenal. The le was completed first and then flowed past the assembly point for each item needed to complete the ship. By 15 74, the arsenal's practices were so advanced that the construction of a complete galley, going from start to finish took less than an hour. Elo Whitney is frequently credited as being the forefather of lean manufacturing. Famous for inventing the cotton gin, it was his promotion of interchangeable parts during the production of 10,000 muskets for a lucrative US Army contract in 17 98, which is amongst the first noted examples of lean thinking. The interchangeable parts on the muskets were cited as being an important factor in the North victory in the American Civil War. The waste reduction thinking of today was introduced by the early industrial engineers around the late 1890s. Frederick W Taylor's book, Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911, began to look at individual workers and work methods in more detail, how long work took to complete and how he could produce more by removing wasteful activities. While Taylor's application of scientific management was sound and still is to this day, his decision to ignore human behaviors, coupled with a dismissive attitude towards workers made him a controversial and difficult character. The concept of waste being built into jobs and then taken for granted was noticed by motion efficiency expert Frank Gilbrith. An advocate of scientific management, Gilbreth went on to develop the motion study and invent process mapping. His wife, Lillian, also introduced workplace psychology and how the motivations of workers could fundamentally impact the outcome of a process. The work of the Gilbriths is often associated with that of Frederick Taylor, yet there was a substantial philosophical difference between the Gilbriths and Taylor. The symbol of Taylorism was a stopwatch. Taylor was concerned primarily with reducing process times. The Gilbriths in contrast, sought to make processes more efficient by reducing the motions involved. They saw their approach as more concerned with workers' welfare than Taylor, which workers themselves often perceived as concerned mainly with profit. Around 1910, Henry Ford and his right hand man, Charles E Sorenson, fashioned the first comprehensive manufacturing strategy, bringing together the until now largely disparate and individually applied elements of any effective organization, peoples, machines, tools, and products, Ford arranged them in a continuous system specifically for the manufacturing of the model T. The results were so successful that Ford quickly became one of the world's richest men by putting the world on wheels and is considered by many to be the first practitioner of in time, which seeks to align production and customer demand. Ford's success inspired many others to copy his methods, but most of those who did would fail to understand the fundamentals. Unprepared for the pace of industrial changes, the Ford system began to suffer, yet he refused to change his system. The advent of labor unions and rise of production proliferation, annual model changes, multiple colors and options further strained the Ford system and did not fit well in his factories. At General Motors, Alfred P Sloan took a more pragmatic approach, developing business and manufacturing strategies for managing very large enterprises and dealing with the variety demanded by an increasing customer base. By the mid 1930s, General Motors had passed Ford in domination of the automotive market by reinterpreting the effective element of Ford's production methods, which were sound even in the new age. The allied victory in the Second World War and the infrastructure behind it caught the attention of postwar Japanese industrialists who were quick to study Western production methods. Tachiono's visit to a US supermarket is often cited as one of the key learnings. The focus of attention were Ford's example, Deming's statistical process control, Juran's management of quality, and the statistical quality control practices of Ishikawa, who is famous for the cause and effect or fishbone diagram, which remains an excellent problem solving technique in virtually any improvement context. At the Toyota Motor Company, Tech Oo and Shigeo Shingo reinterpreted the successful elements of the Ford production method, integrating them with the scientific management foundations laid by Taylor and Gilbreth and several other techniques from the West, labeling it as the Toyota Production System or TPS. Toyota acknowledged that the Ford system had several fundamental shortcomings, most notably with respect to employees and their engagement. Toyota capitalized on the fact that factory workers had far more to offer than just muscle power. Their findings probably originated in the quality circle movement, which thanks to its major contribution by Shikawa Deming and Juran, led to team development and cellular manufacturing. While production cell concepts may not immediately translate to other environments, team development and multi skilling are critical in successful application of lean service. From 1949 through the mid 1970s, the TPS approach was adopted interpreted by other Japanese companies. When the productivity and quality gains became evident to the wider world, executives of the American companies, from whom the East had learned, traveled to Japan to understand how their counterparts had so rapidly developed their thinking. By the 1980s, some American manufacturers, such as Omark Industries, General Electric and Kawasaki, were achieving success through considered application of the tools and techniques perfected in the East. Consultants took up the campaign, and acronyms sprouted like weeds, yet they all referred to systems that were simply derived from TPS. Gradually, a global knowledge and experience base developed, and success stories became more frequent and attracted greater publicity. Len caught the imagination of manufacturing experts across the globe. Branded implementations quickly became commonplace and led to a rapid expansion in experience and knowledge, creating debate on the wider application of LN, particularly outside of its industrial origins. One of the core elements of lean thinking are the five key principles, which this day do not substantially differ from the techniques developed by Ono, Shingo, any originators at Toyota. The application in any specific industry sector significantly changes, and just as many firms copied for techniques in lazy and unthinking ways, many businesses, especially those outside of manufacturing, have simply copied Toyota's example, often with poor results. In 1990, James Womack co wrote The Machine that Changed the world with Daniel T Jones and Daniel Roos. The book recounted the history of global automobile manufacturing, combined with the study of Japanese American and European automotive assembly plants. Perhaps the most significant contribution to popular culture and business improvement was the book introducing the term Lean. In the mid 1990s, service and public sector industries were becoming increasingly interested in the benefits of applying lean to their operations. As with manufacturing firms looking to apply the Toyota production system, service companies have to give serious consideration to how lean thinking, particularly the tools and techniques, fits their business and how to apply it in order to achieve meaningful and lasting benefits. In 2003, John Seddon put forward the concept of value demand and failure demand. Value demand comes from recognizing the initial request for a service from the customer, and is ultimately about what it is that a company or service exists to provide. Failure demand is classified as the failure to do something or do something right for the customer or in simple terms, did we do it right first time? Sedn's approach made significant improvements for the customers of Portsmouth Housing Authority, whilst also reducing costs. Great. Now that you have seen the video, my first question is, how old is Len in practice? My second question is, is Len only for manufacturing? The third question is, what did you learn from the Toyotas example from this video? The next question is which book was mentioned in this video. Please give your answers in the comment section below. And 4. What is Lean?: But what is lien in simple English? Lien is about delivering maximum value with minimum waste. It's about removing inefficiencies, simplifying process, and making every step count. When you streamline, you don't just improve the process. You are increasing the efficiency and improving the impact. That's the power of lien. What is lien? Let's go with the examples. At its core, N is fundamentally about maximizing value while minimizing waste. Whether you are from manufacturing industry, service or a digital transformation, the goal remains the same. Deliver more with less by focusing on what truly matters to the customer. Today, we are going to explore three key concepts about lien and how we can use AI to improve these efforts. First one is customer centric approach. Always start by understanding what the customer truly values. Understanding customers need is the first step in streamlining the operations. Example, a retail company uses AI driven customer feedback analysis to tailor, personalize promotions and improve the customer engagement. The second is continuous improvement or Kison. LN encourages iterative mindset when small changes accumulate to drive efficiencies. If I think about an example from a financial service firm, it uses AI to monitor fraud patterns in transactions, continuously improving fraud detection algorithm. The third is waste elimination. LN identifies seven types of waste, Tim woods. The eighth one is more important. I will cover it. Transportation, inventory, motion, weighting, over processing, overproduction and defect. Skill Set waste is the eighth st, which is very important in today's world. A healthcare provider reduces the patient waiting time by using AI powered scheduling system, optimizing the doctor's availability. LN is about thinking different and focusing on delivering more. What do we focus on? What is great today isn't going to be good enough tomorrow. Lean isn't about one time fix. It's a mindset of constant learning, experimentation, and evolution. Small changes repeatedly done with consistency leads to transformational results. Len isn't about working better. It is about thinking differently, challenging the limits and defining what's possible. The lean principle in short, is stay simple, do smart, and become powerful. 5. Benefits of Lean Implemeantation: The benefits of an implementation, let's understand with the help of some scenarios and quiz. Let's do it as a rapid fire to or falls round. I repeat I'll say the question. I want you to write the answer in the comment section. Lean LN is only applicable to manufacturing industry and not the service industry. Falls. It is applicable across industries. One of the Len's primary goal is financial service to eliminate non value added activities to reduce operational cost. True. Lien implementation in healthcare can help reduce patients waiting time and improve the service delivery. Obviously, this is true. Lien prioritizes cost cutting over customer satisfaction. You guessed it right? No, because N is a customer focused approach. So we are not going to prioritize over customer satisfaction. It will be along with customer satisfaction. In a contact center, one form of waste could be excessive call transfer due to inefficient routing. Yes, because it's a type of waste. Let's understand with some examples over here. One of the biggest advantage of lien in a banking and financial services and insurance industry is to reduce A, reduce the customer service time, identification and elimination of wasteful process, increase paperwork for compliance, more time spent on reporting. You guessed it right. It is identification and elimination of wasteful process. Let's move to the next question. Which of the following is not a type of waste in a service industry? Waiting time for approval. O processing, unnecessary documents, increased employee engagement, excessive motion due to poor workflow layout. Yes, it's not a type of waste, so we should look at something that is value creating. It is increased employee engagement. In healthcare, how does team improve patient care? By increasing the number of staff, this is going to add up the cost by reducing the patient wait time and eliminating inefficiency in service delivery. By cutting down medical equipment usage, by focusing only on cost reduction. Yes, you guessed it right. By reducing patient wait time and eliminating inefficiency in service delivery. Which lien principle ensures that services are delivered based on customer demand rather than pushing unnecessary services. Value stream mapping, flow, pull system, or standardization. It is based on customer demand rather than pushing. So opposite of pushing will be a pull system. How does an impact workplace culture in service industry? It creates a culture of micromanagement. It emphasizes continuous improvement, employee involvement, and collaboration. It eliminates team based decision making. It focuses on cutting cost measures. You are right. It emphasizes on continuous improvement, employee involvement, and collaboration. Let's understand the next scenario. A bank is struggling with a long loan approval time, which frustrates the customers. The process involves multiple handoffs between departments, excessive paper weeks, waiting for managerial approval. Which lean technique should be applied. Value stream mapping, increasing the number of employees, extending the working hours, or removing the compliance chat. You know that B, C, and D are not correct. So I'm going to focus on VSM to identify inefficiencies and remove unnecessary steps. Contact Center has noticed that agents frequently transfer calls between departments because the process is unclear. Customers are often kept on hold for a long period, leading to dissatisfaction. What lean approach can solve this? Reduce the number of agents to encourage efficiency, implement the cross training for agents to handle multiple queries without transfer, increase the whole time limit, assign each customer fixed agent. Correct. The D is absolutely not the correct approach, and I cannot be increasing the whole time. I cannot reduce the number of agents. So it is about implementing cross training for agents to handle multiple queries without transfers. Let's move on. A hospital emergency department is experiencing long patient wait time. This is leading to overcrowding. Which lean tool can help address this issue? AFIS methodology to improve workplace organization, a carbun system to ensure smooth patient flow based on real time demand, increase the number of doctors, and reduce the diagnostic test. C and D happens to be very dangerous. Correct. So we are going to go with Carbo to ensure smooth patient flow. Moving to the next question, an insurance company claims department in experiencing delays because employees spend too much time manually entering customer data into multiple systems. How can N help implement automation, digital workflows to reduce manual data entry, hire additional employees to handle the backlogs, extend the working hours, or reduce the number of claims process per day. Again, B, C, and D are very dangerous. So I'm going to go ahead and implement automation and digital workflows to reduce the manual data entry. Are you able to understand how are we understanding the practical application of lien let's move on. A service company handling customer service notices a high level of employee burnout due to redundant task, excessive documentation. Which lane principle would help improve their employee well being, waste reduction by automating repetitive task, implementing strict work quotas to enforce productivity, encouraging employees to complete task manually to stay engaged, assigning fewer task for employees, but increasing the working hours. And, waste reduction by automating the repetitive task because these tasks are also redundant. To summarize the benefit of lien implementation, the focus is on reducing waste, eliminating non value added activities across process, improving efficiency, streamlining workflows, and shorten the cycle time, enhance customer satisfaction, deliver better quality and faster service with fewer errors. Boost employee engagement, empower teams to solve problems and improve their own work. Support cost reduction, save money by optimizing resource usage, enable data driven decision, encourage use of real time metrics and visual management. Drive continuous improvement, foster a culture of learning and innovation, build sustainable growth, align performance with the long term business goal. I will see you in the next lesson where we will cover about lean tools and techniques. 6. Lean Tools list: We will learn about value stream mapping to visualize the bottcks. Then we will also learn about five techniques to dig into the real causes. Standard work to reduce the variability. Visual management, to make the gap visible, Tyson for team driven improvement. We will also learn about FIS methodology to organize the workspace for efficiency and safety. Then we will cover Tin woods, the acronym for eight types of waste in the process. How do we identify and eliminate them? We will learn about spaghetti diagram to visualize and reduce unnecessary movements. Then we will learn about carban systems to manage the workflow and limit work and progress. Problem solving tools are very important to find and fix the root cause of the issue. And finally, we will also try to understand time and motion study to analyze the task steps and improve productivity. 7. Lean Guide Training: Have you ever been in a situation where you noticed inefficiencies at work where processes could have been faster or smoother? Let me share a story of Toyota. One of the pioneers of Lee. Back in 1950s, Toyota introduced the concept of just in time. This was the way it revolutionized the manufacturing industry, how they produced cards. Before Len, the process involved large inventories of parts waiting to be assembled. However, Toyota realized this created unnecessary waste in storage and handling. By applying lean principles, they shifted to a system where parts only arrived as needed on the production line cutting down the excess inventory. This not only saved money, but also improved the speed of production. It reduced errors. In fact, they were able to reduce the production time by over 30%. This is a great example of lean isn't just about doing things faster. It is about creating more value by eliminating waste in all forms from inventory to the time spent on tasks that don't contribute directly to the customer's need. This story is just one example and through. And this training, we are going to explore more tools and techniques like Justin time and Kison that can help you spot and eliminate waste in your own work environment. 8. Role of Lean Guide: The role of a lean guide as organizations mature in their lean journey, the need evolves for just running projects to building a culture of continuous improvement. And this role can easily be managed by a person called Lean Guide. The lean guide is the one whose role goes beyond applying just tools. The lean guide becomes a coach, a mentor, and a culture carrier. Someone who empowers the team nurtures problem solving and aligns improvement with strategic goals. We will break down exactly what a lean guide does and how it differs from a lean practitioner or a project lead. Think about someone in your workplace who doesn't just solve problems but helps others get better at solving them. Would you call them as lean guide? 9. Lean Practioner vs Lean Guide: In this lesson, we will understand the difference between a lean practitioner and a lean guide. These are two important roles in the world of lean. They have one purpose, but the different levels of impact. We need to understand this difference to understand what is our role and how much impact are we making. Many lean efforts are stalled because the roles are blurred. Implementing tools without changing the culture creates a fragile system. Tools alone can't create transformation. Promoting practitioners without developing a guiding capabilities lead to a tool driven moment that reverse once the project ends. Both rules are essential for success, execution and sustainability. A practitioner ensures that the work gets done right today. A guide ensures the work continues to improve tomorrow. Lean fails without either of them. Without practitioner, nothing changes on the ground. Without guides, improvements don't stick. So a practitioner is one does hands on problem solving. His core responsibility is to lead improvement projects, apply specific lean tools like five as KIS and value stream mapping, and support the team on the ground during the implementation. His focus area is daily execution, process stability, and waste elimination. Gemba workstation, where the value is created, process tools like fives KIS and VSM applications. We do the time and flow tracking for the daily execution and monitoring. This real time observation helps in proper data collection and helps in daily execution monitoring. The scope of the practitioner is at team level, single process or a department. His nature is tactical and project based. The value he creates is that he creates a faster process, reduce defect, and tangible local improvements. Let's now move to the lean guide. He's a strategic coach. He coaches leaders and teams and teaches them the why, not just the how. Aligns the lean initiative with the organization strategy. He focuses on building capability, not dependency. The focus area is long term transformation, leadership behavior, organizational culture. His job is a long term vision and path connecting strategies across the organization levels. The scope of the guide is cross functional end to end value stream enterprise level, and his nature is cultural and systematic. The value he creates is sustainable improvement loops, consistent decision making across the teams and lean thinking embedded in the culture. From doing lean to leading lean. Practitioners are executors and guides are for giving direction. Executes, improvements, solve specific problem in front of them. That's the role of a lean practitioner. Whereas a lean guide shapes the direction and priorities, determines which problems are worth solving to align with the strategy. What's the difference between tools and thinking? A practitioner applies tools like Fs, CAB, SMEAD to fix physical issues, whereas a guide develops the thinking capability of the team, uses inquiry model and schastic coaching to fix the mental blocks. The practitioner builds the process and the guide builds the people who runs the process. Are you looking at short term wins or a long term capability building? A practitioner is one who is working for delivering projects results. Success is defined by thepletion of a sprint or an event. A guide's job is to build the system and habits, and success is defined by what happens when they aren't in the room. Practitioner solves a problem. They are the experts in the room. A guide is the one who teaches others to solve the problem. They make others the expert. Technical expertise is where practitioner is the foundation. You know the work to guide the work. Then you do project leadership, and finally, you become a leadership or a lean guide. What changes as you grow? Less firefighting, less direct intervention and less of using of authority. You are doing more of coaching, more of questioning, more of influencing without authority. Where do you stand? That's a question which you have to ask yourself. Do you spend your day fixing processes? Do you spend your day developing people? Are you in a messy middle trying to guide but getting pulled back into fixing? Let's identify someone in your organization who already plays the role of a lean guide, someone who asks question rather than giving the answer straightforward. Someone who focuses on cross development flow. Someone who remains calm when things do not go or focus on the learning opportunity. The core difference is that a practitioner improves the processes. The guide transforms the organization. Lean tool changes the process, lean guide changes the system. And 10. Differences between Lean and Traditional Management: So to summarize between lean and traditional management is on focus and philosophy. Maximize value by eliminating waste and improving the flow, approach in planning, being adaptive and just in time, process orientation, being iterative and continuous improvement, customer involvement, high customer involvement throughout the project. Team empowerment, Measurement of success is checking the value delivered, flow efficiency and customer satisfaction, handling change by embracing it as an opportunity to improve waste elimination, removing non value added activities, document. Minimal documentation focuses on what is need to be delivered rather than just getting ground in the documents. 11. Purpose of Doing a Business: At its core, lien is about one thing, delivering more value with less waste. Every action, every process, every decision should serve the purpose to enhance efficiency, streamline operations, and maximize the impact. Everything starts with the customer. What do they need? What problem are we trying to solve? LN ensures that every action contributes directly to the customer's satisfaction. Nothing more, nothing less. The second is map the value stream. Waste is the enemy, whether it's time, effort, or resources. LN is about eliminating inefficiencies, cutting what doesn't add value, and ensuring that every step in the process is essential. Value stream mapping sees the big picture change everything. This VSM exercise helps the organization visualize the workflow, identify the bottlenecks and optimize the process for peak efficiencies. Establishing pull is what keeps Lian from becoming just another mechanical system. It ensures work happens only when there's a real demand, no over production, no wasted effort, just right value at the right time to the right customer. Think about your own work. If you are pushing task forward, or are they pulling based on the real demand? LN isn't about efficiency just, it's about a purposeful efficiency. The pull is important and establishing the pull is very important. The next step is continuous improvement. Continuous improvement is essentially in lean principles, encouraging team to consistently seek ways to enhance processes and outcomes. Take Toyota's example, the benchmark of N. Instead of mass producing cars and stacking them in the warehouse, they produced only when the customer placed an order. Even Dell operates on the same principle. That's the pull. It minimizes waste, reduces the inventory cost, ensures every product has a purpose before even exist. So now look at this slide and tell me what is missing. The first one is maximize customer value. Second one, minimize waste. Value stream mapping, continuous improvement. Yes, you are right. You guessed it correct. Establishing the pull is the element that is missing from this list. Good work. What is the purpose of doing a business? What do you think? Before we jump into lean and performing process performance improvement, let's pause and ask a fundamental question. What's the real purpose of doing the business? Take a moment, think beyond profits and targets. What comes to your mind? Please answer it in the comment section. It's about making money, solving problem, creating jobs, or adding value. Please jot down few responses in the comment section below. There is no wrong answer. We will dive deeper. Yes. What's the purpose of doing the business? Let's start with profits. Yes, profit is critical. It sustains the operation and funds the growth, but is this the only reason why we exist as a business? The second is stakeholder satisfaction or customer satisfaction. Long term profits can only be possible when you deliver real value consistently to our customers, employees, and stakeholders. The next is to get into a broader purpose, that is increase in turnover. Because when the turnover does go well, profits will increase. Customer satisfaction is also important because we exist for customer. Improving productivity helps us to have a proper work life balance and ensure that our employees are enjoying work. We also focus on reducing cost because to increase the profit, I have to keep my cost in control. That does not mean that I'm going to throw away people. I'm just going to get them to do more efficient work. I'm going to create jobs because if you are in business, you are creating employment opportunities. Help suppliers grow their business. Profit isn't just the goal, profit is the result. In this whole journey, the suppliers are also your important stakeholders. We are also helping the community because we get involved in CSR activity and that we are able to do because we contribute to a few percentage of our profit towards the society upliftment. 12. Three Pillars of Profitable Business: Think about this. The three pillars of a profitable business are desirable growth because business exists, they look for what can they take to grow profitably. Just bigger, better. Every business today balances on three important growth aspect, the desirable growth. The growth that the customer wants, it's driven by understanding what creates real value. It would be launching the right product, improving services, and enhancing customer experience. The next is sustainable growth. It's a growth that doesn't burn out people or resources. It builds on efficient operations, consistent process, and meaningful resource usage. Lean helps here, remove waste, improve flow. Can we help growing the way first year from now or from three years from now, predictable growth. This is where data and systems come in. Growth can plan out. With the right metric discipline and standardized performance becomes repeatable, not just based on lack. Can we forecast the next quarter's performance with confidence? Growth that matters because every business wants to grow, not only grow, but create equal opportunity in the society. True success isn't just about increasing numbers, it's about scaling it in the right way. That means ensuring a desirable, sustainable and predictable growth is very important. The growth has to benefit the business, the employees, the customer, the stakeholders. It's about expanding the way we align with purpose, value, and long term vision. Are we growing in a way that enhances customer experience? Is this growth making our organization stronger, not just bigger, sustainable growth? Growth that can last flash in the pan success that isn't real success. Sustainable business focuses on efficient systems, adaptable models, and long term resilience. Are we scaling in a way that can be maintained over a period of time? Do we have the right process in the place to support this growth? Predictable growth. Guesswork isn't just drive success, strategy does. Predictable growth means data driven insights, clear forecasting, and repeatable success patterns. Can we actually project future revenue, demand, and expansion? Are we growing based on proven systems rather than wishful thinking? Growth without direction is a kios. The real question isn't just that are we growing? The question is, are we growing in the right way? The best businesses don't chase random expansion. They build growth that is meaningful, sustainable, and scalable. That's the difference between short term winds and long term domination. 13. Pizza Delivered Cold KPIs are Green: Internal efficiency internal efficiency versus customer experience. Why good metrics can still create bad service? The common blind spot we observe over speed, status update and checklist. We assume that if the dashboard is green, the customer is happy. The reality is on time internal step does not automatically equal to a good service. To see service through the customer's lens and identify where waste heights is the white space between the departments. Welcome, everyone. We are here to talk about the paradox. Most of us run our days by dashboards. We track speed, we track completion rate, we track completion rate, and we track status. When those lights turn green, we feel good. But today, we are going to challenge the idea that internal efficiency equals customer satisfaction. We're going to look at why your customer data might say we are winning while your customer feels you are failing. We focus on speed and checklist, but overlook the journey. We look at the task. Each task like document review data and reapproval routing, how much time it is taken, it is complete, it is done, and so on. So when we track the speed of individual task, status update of individual task, and compliance checklist of individual task, we assume I did my job fast and the system is working well. The missing piece is the customer does not see your checklist, does not see your individual task. They experience the entire flow. So in our daily huddles, we do in our daily huddles, what do we ask? Did you finish that ticket? Is the report filed? We focus on the, we focus on the speed of the task. But this creates a tunnel vision where we assume that if every individual person does their job specifically quickly, the respect but this creates a tunnel vision where we assume that if every individual person does their job specific and quickly, the result is perfect. As we are about to see, this is a dangerous assumption. Let's look at a scenario. We all know ordering a pizza. Look at this from a restaurant's perspective. The order comes in, it's confirmed in 2 minutes, the kitchen preps it in 8 minutes flat, record time. The dispatch is at 7:10 P.M. If you are the manager looking at this screen, you're going to give a hi fi to your team. The metric looks green and the process worked. All the steps marked on time, order confirmed in 2 minutes, preparation station completed in 8 minutes, dispatch log 710 on schedule. The system status appears healthy. All the kitchen KPIs are met, the dispatch KPIs are met, system status is green. The organization feels successful. At this moment, the organization feels successful. The kitchen staff feels that they did their job well. The dispatcher feels they did their job well. According to the internal definition of success, completing tasks on schedule, there is no problem at all. This is a happy path. We did our job. The process follows the standard. Delivery was successful, 100% process compliance. The customer view, disappointed reality 8:00 P.M. Arrival time, 20 minutes late, conditioned cold, crushed pizza, poor service. Now, let's flip the lens. This is exactly the same order, but this is what the customer sees. The pizza arrived at 8:00 P.M. It's 20 minutes late. It's cold, the box is lightly crushed. The customer does not care what the kitchen prepped it in 8 minutes. They don't care that the dispatch software worked. They cared that the dinner is ruined. Customer don't experience the prep time, they experience the outcome. Fresh hot pizza versus the reality, the expectation versus the reality. This brings us to the critical question. Does the customer care about internal metrics? No, they care about the value they paid for. This case, hot, fresh pizza. The disconnect here is massive. We measured the process. They experience the result and the results are frustration. Does the customer care about dispatch time or do they care about the hot meal? The customer experiences disappointment, frustration and loss of trust. This is where we have to be honest about our dashboards. Look at the difference. We track prep time. The customer values freshness. These are correlated, but they are not the same. You can prepare the pizza in 5 minutes. But if it sits in the cell for 40 minutes, the prep metric is green, but the freshness metric is red. So understand one thing, internal metric is not equal to customer experience. You are thinking about dispatch time, delivery logs. Customer is valuing the arrival time, the convenience, and the ease. So when we track steps, customer feels the outcome. Optimizing a single step does not guarantee the quality of the whole journey. Why does this happen? Usually it's because of silos. Kitchen optimizes for kitchen speed, driver optimizes for driving routine, but who is optimizing for the pizza? Often, the answer is no one. In Len, we learn that we have an efficient part and still have broken the system. Why does this disconnect exist? Because we are not looking at it from an end to end experience. There is no ownership. We are not looking at optimizing the flow and improving the customer experience as a whole. We are looking at individual tasks and cues. Waste heights in the handoff, work green, waiting time in the rack, red, waiting time for the driver, red. W of driving is again green. So if you look at the timeline of the cold pizza, we can see something interesting. The actual work of making the pizza, driving the car was very fast. The problem was the white space in between. The pizza sat on the rack, the driver waited for the keys, waist heights in the handoff. It's invisible for our departmental report, but it's the primary cause of the delay. Kitchen is efficient, Dispatch is efficient, coordination is failed. Invisible to dashboard but felt by the customer. Teams feel efficiency matrix, hand off friction and delays are not seen by them. This type of waste is dangerous because it's invisible. If the kitchen burns a pizza, you know. But if the pizza sits for 10 minutes waiting for the driver, no alarm goes off. Everyone is green. Yet the customer experience is degrading by the minute. We need to shift our focus from speed within silos to flow across the value stream. It's not just about being slow. It's also about being unpredictable. If you tell a customer it will take 60 minutes, it arrives in 60 minutes, then it's fine. But if you say 30 minutes and it takes an hour, they are angry. The variation is the enemy. One day the Pizza is early, the next day it's late. That inconsistency destroys trust faster than anything else. Variation hurts more than delay. One good experience doesn't build trust. Inconsistent service destroys it. Customer might forgive a known delay, but they do not forgive unpredictability. In an, we don't just want to be fast. We want to be predictable. Variation creates waste. We have to add buffer time. We have a deal with complaints. We have to remake cold food. Standardize the flow creates trust. We want a boring, predictable process that delivers value every single time. So variation creates waste. The goal is to create our process predictable. When we remove variation, we remove the anxiety. Where is the cold pizza in your organization? Can you recall a service that felt disjoint or frustrating even though each step seemed efficient? Now, let's leave the restaurant. We want to think about your own work or service you consume. Can you recall a time when the service felt disjoint? Everyone you talk to seemed to be doing their job well. So where is the cold pizza in your organization? Is it between sales and implementation, ticket transfer between IT tiers, patient transfer between the hospital units? This isn't just about food. If the online order is marked as shipped that sits in the warehouse for four days. If the customer service calls where the three different agents sounds helpful, but your problem isn't solved for weeks. If the doctor's appointment that runs on time, but the billing is a mess, these are all examples of efficient silos failing to deliver a coherent experience. They judge experience. Customer don't judge data or they don't judge dashboards. They judge the experience. So as we close, remember this, your customer never sees your internal reports. They don't know you hit your KPIs. They only know the experience felt. If you want to truly improve, we have to stop optimizing our own little corners of the world and look at the whole picture. We must stop validating ourselves with internal metrics and start validating our value through the customer's eyes. Lean thinking encourages us to view the whole journey. If the customer didn't feel it, it did not happen. The bottom line is the how. Technology and AI can give us all the data in the world. They can analyze every time line in the milliseconds, but data doesn't fix problem. People do. Lean helps us see the flow, find the waste, and fix the experience. AI analyzes timelines. Lean fixes the flow. Thank you, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 14. Lean Management Fundamentals: We will take a look at the video, and I will have five questions. So please watch it carefully. Have you ever had that feeling where your business is growing so fast, it feels like it's about to spin out of control. You're not alone. That's a super common problem. Today we're going to dive into lean management. It's this really powerful way of thinking that's all about turning that chaos into well clarity. We're going to explore how you can use it to build real solid customer value by getting a handle on your workflow and making quality a non negotiable part of your process. So your business is growing, and that's amazing. But here's the thing a lot of people don't realize. This is probably the single most dangerous time for your company. All of a sudden, you're hit with these massive questions, right? Do we hire more people? Should we invest in new equipment and getting those answers wrong? Yikes. It can be fatal. Seriously. So many otherwise successful businesses stumble and fall right at this exact point. You know how it goes. As you get bigger, things just get more complicated. Delays start to feel normal, and there's all this hidden waste lurking just under the surface. This is exactly where Lean comes in and just changes the entire game. It's not about just getting bigger for the sake of it. It's about getting smarter as you grow. Think of Lean as a blueprint for scaling up successfully. It's all about taking that chaos and turning it into focus, swapping those constant interruptions for a smooth, continuous flow and transforming all that hidden waste into something your customer actually values. Alright, so here's our game plan. First, we'll get into the core mindset of N. Then we'll walk through four key principles, the pulse system, one piece flow, tack time, and zero defects. And to wrap it all up, we'll see how these pieces fit together to put you on a path of constant improvement. Okay, first things first, we have to talk about the lean mindset. And this is so important because lean is not just a bunch of tools or some kind of quick fix program. It is a completely different way of looking at your business, your people, and what it is you're actually creating for your customers. So what is lean, really? Well, you can think of it as a philosophy that stands on three main pillars. Pillar number one, everything, and I mean everything is about delivering value from your customer's point of view, not yours, theirs. Pillar two, you get there by being absolutely relentless about finding and getting rid of waste in your processes. And pillar three, you never stop improving. It's a constant ongoing cycle of always getting a little bit better day after day. Alright, let's jump into our first big principle, the pull system. Now, this one is a real game changer. It can totally transform how work moves through your entire organization. So what on Earth is a pull system? It's actually pretty simple. It just means you don't do anything. Don't build a product, don't start a service until a customer has actually asked for it. It's that real concrete customer demand that acts as the trigger, literally pulling the work through your process. And this is a huge difference from how most companies work, right? Most of us are used to a push system. You make as much stuff as you can based on some forecast, and then you just push it out there and hope people buy it. Lean completely flips that script. With a pull system, you only make what's needed right when it's needed. Why? Because an actual customer is at the other end pulling it from. The impact this has on the business is, well, it's massive. When you sync up your work with what customers are actually asking for, you instantly slash the biggest form of waste there is over production. And when you do that, you're not tying up cash in a warehouse full of stuff nobody's bought yet. That frees up your money, your working capital, so you can invest it back into growing the business. It is a total game changer. Okay, so the pol system tells us what to work on and when. But the next question is, how should that work actually move through our system? That's where our second principle comes in. It's called one piece flow. The whole idea here is to fight that natural urge we all have to work in big batches. Instead, you focus all your energy on moving just one single thing at a time, all the way through the process. And that thing could be a physical product, a report, a customer ticket, whatever. I know it might feel slower at first, but trust me, it's unbelievably powerful. So why does this work so well? Because it drastically cuts down on all that half finished work that's just sitting around clogging up the system. It creates a much smoother process, gets rid of all those annoying stops and starts and shortens the time it takes from start to finish. And here's the best part. Problems have nowhere to hide. They pop up right away, which means you can fix them immediately. All of this makes you faster, more flexible, and it drives your quality way up. Okay, so we know what to work on because of our pulse system. We know how it should move with one piece flow. Now we need to figure out the speed. How fast should we be going? And that brings us to our third principle, which is called talked time. I absolutely love this quote because it's just so perfect. Tacked time really is the heartbeat of Alene system. It's the rhythm, that steady, consistent pulse that your whole operation needs to sync up with. It sets the pace for absolutely everything. Now, here's the key thing to get. This pace isn't about how fast you can work. It's about how fast you need to work to keep up with your customer's demand. It's actually a pretty simple formula. You just take your available working time and divide it by the number of things your customer wants. That's it. It's basically the rhythm of your customer's buying habits. So why is this such a big deal? Because tag time helps you balance the work perfectly across your whole team or system. You don't get those frustrating bottlenecks where work piles up, and you don't have people just sitting around with nothing to do. It's this balance that makes that smooth continuous flow possible. And that, in turn, makes your entire company super agile and able to pivot when the market changes. Okay, onto our final principle. And you could argue this is the most important one of all zero defects. This isn't what it sounds like, though. It's all about building quality right into your process from the get go. This quote really nails the mindset. See, it's not about being perfect and never making mistakes. That's impossible, right? We're all human. The big idea here is that you build a system where you just don't pass a defect along to the next person in line, and you definitely don't pass it on to the customer. The way this works in practice sounds simple, but boy, does it take discipline? The second a mistake is found, everything stops. I mean, immediately, not after you finish the batch, not at the end of the day, right then and there. Then you fix the problem right at the source, and work doesn't start up again until you figured out why it happened and put something in place to make sure it doesn't happen again. So there you have it. Pull, flow, talked, and zero defects. But here's the thing. You can't just pick your favorite and ignore the rest. These aren't separate menu items. Their real magic happens when they all work together as one big interconnected system. When you take these four principles and you power them with a real culture of continuous improvement, you create an incredibly powerful engine for your business. This goes way beyond just being a little more efficient. We're talking about building a real lasting competitive advantage that helps you thrive, no matter what the market throws at you. So you can see how it creates this amazing, self reinforcing cycle. The pool system tells you what to make. T time tells you how fast to go. One piece flow keeps it all moving. Zero defects make sure it's done right, and the whole thing is wrapped in this commitment to always getting better. Remember, this isn't a one and done project. It's a discipline you practice every single day. And at the end of the day, that's what this is all about. Lean isn't just some corporate exercise to cut costs or move faster. It's a way of thinking that empowers your team, absolutely delights your customers, and really truly brings out the very best that your business has to offer. So I want to leave you with a challenge, something to take back with you to your team. Tomorrow, when you go into work, try to look at your processes with a fresh pair of eyes and ask yourself, what is the very first piece of waste? You know, waiting around, making too much of something, fixing mistakes? What's the first thing you can find that you can start to eliminate right now? 15. Lean Mindset: What is your understanding about the lean philosophy and the lean mindset? U Len isn't new. It's a philosophy that dates back to 1950s with Toyota Production System TPS, a system that changed the manufacturing forever. But here's the thing. Lean isn't about production, it's about mindset. It's the core of the lean thinking. Toyota didn't just build cars. They build a culture of continuous improvement, respect for people and relentless efficiency. That is the foundation that sparked the revolution. One of the business across the industry continued to build upon today, eliminate waste of all forms. Empower employees, drive innovation. Lean isn't not a system, it's a mindset. It's about thinking differently, seeing the waste before it happens, empowering people to innovate. The question is, are you just following the process or are you continuously improving them? 16. Traditional Management Mindset: This is a very powerful it's not just the method but the mindset. Before we dive into the tools and the techniques, it's important to step back and look for fundamental shift in mindset that lean pre represents. This is just not about change in how we manage the process. It's a shift in how we think about leadership, people, value, and growth. Over the next few slides, we will explore how traditional management differs from lean thinking and why this choice defines how future ready an organization really is. So as we go through this, think about your own organization. Do you see more of traditional traits or the lean management principle? What impact does one have over the performance and the culture? Let's understand this scenario. A bank team is under pressure to complete a new loan approval process with a fixed budget and timeline. Leadership is insisting on hitting the launch date, even though the customer feedback shows poor usability. The question is, should the team focus on completing what they scoped or shift the focus to the customer usability. Please give your answer in the comment section below. Who does what value mean here? Management, timeline or customer. The answer is the traditional concept or management principle focuses on hitting the scope, time, and cost. Lean focuses on maximizing customer value even if it means changing the direction of the wines stream. So focus and philosophy. Case study SLA versus customer value. A leading telecom provider engages an outsourcing partner to design its customer on boarding process. The objective is to streamline the journey for the new customer and reduce the drop offs. The operation team completes the redesign strictly according to the SLA, the service level agreement. All timelines and deliverables and documents scope are met. However, early customer feedback highlights are critical gaps. The instructions are confusing and difficult to follow. Despite repeated mention from the end user, the feedback is not acted upon. When challenged, the operation manager responded. We met the scope, it's up to the client to fix the communication gap. Understand the stakeholder's perspective. Client, who is a telecom company wants a smoother onboarding experience that reduces customer complaints and call center load. Operation team believes success is equal to SLAmetrics on time delivery within scope, no rework. N customer struggles with the confusing instruction, leading to frustration and increased support call. Operation manager focuses on compliance and scope rather than overall value delivery. The key dilemma over here is, should the project success be defined only by the SLA compliance, ticking in the box or by the customer satisfaction and the volume delivered? What's your opinion? Please drop it in the text box on the comment section below. Should should the project success be defined only by the SLA compliance? The discussion question for the participant is in lean and Six Sigma terms, how should value be defined by process completion or customer experience? If the SLA does not capture customer feedback, what tools VOC, CTQT Co analysis bridge the gap? How can the ops manager shift from the compliance mindset to a continuous improvement mindset? What process improvement could ensure feedback loops are integrated in the SLA driven projects? Okay. If you were the client, how would you realign the expectation with the service provider? A banking client requests a chatbot upgrade. The project is fixed for three months, but the customer inquires change midway due to the new KYC regulation, and the changes are delay due to the rigid timelines. What is the risk of not adapting to the regulatory or client changes? Would a flexible planning have helped operation respond faster? Len adapts continuously based on real time data. The cost of sticking to a plan made it past when the context is already changed. Team often assumes sticking to the plan is equal to being disciplined, but Len argues that adaption is the discipline. Change is the only thing that's constant. In service industry, regulation and customer behaviors evolve rapidly. Original plan may be outdated in weeks. Would a flexible planning have helped you faster? Lead with a lean approach, break the larger goal into smaller milestones. Example, two weeks sprint, leave the room for client collaboration and checkpoints, revisit the assumptions in every feedback loop. Could we have delivered the chatbot in two weeks increment with involving logic built in. Tradition is lock and deliver, leans sense and respond. Process orientation. A customer support process is inefficient, but the team is told. Let's finish fourth quarter Aztus. We will optimize that in the next cycle. The question is, what are we losing by waiting to improve? Could we apply Kison to make daily microimprovements now? This question brings out opportunity cost. Delaying process improvement is equal to the loss time, lost productivity, and loss client trust. Daily pain continues for the agents and customers, leading to frustration, fatigue, and errors. Emphasize waiting for quarterly review means we endure in inefficiency leading to acting. Lean says, fix it now even in small ways. The second question, how can Kison be applied? We would cut our redundant steps from the call flow tomorrow. We can test one message tweak before the full rework. Agents could flag daily friction in the shared channel. Kisn means small frequent low risk improvements. It does not need a project kickoff or a leadership sign off. It needs ownership and the intent. Traditional is fixed during the plant cycle. Lien is about improving continuously. A healthcare client is involved during the onboarding and quarterly reviews. Meanwhile, agent face new member questions daily, but can't escalate process update on time. How would more frequent client improvement help resolve this issue? Clients don't always know what's happening on the ground. Infrequent engagement creates surprise gaps. By the time it reaches them, it's already escalated. Lean encourages frequent feedback loops so that the client and the delivery team stay aligned. Let's think with an example. A weekly sink or a monthly dashboard could allow for an hourly warning before it becomes a complaint. What cascades of the engagement would benefit both the sides. Let the participants suggest a high volume client may need short regular feedback, a steady step, one might need less. Len keeps the customer involved continuously. Traditional management relies on milestone based checkpoint. Client joins only at the milestone. Lean says client is a partner throughout the journey. At ABC Company, the team meets the client's target turnaround time for tickets but receive negative feedback due to robotic reply and unresolved issue. Is the operation success enough without the user feedback? Because the feedback form shows that the customers still don't feel understood due to generic and scripted response. If the metric look green, but the experience feels red, are we truly succeeding? Traditional metrics like SLA, AHD, TAT, track compliances, not value. Len adds qualitative feedback. So what metrics would reflect the real impact? It could be first call resolution, escalation reduction, agent empowerment score. This could create a balanced scorecard where both the hard numbers and the soft signals can be highlighted. Success is value delivered and flow efficiency. Traditional management believes that success is meeting the SLmetric. A client request a mid process shift in escalation logic. The operation team resist. We will raise a change request. It might take three weeks. The operation team replies, we have already locked the script, so let's raise a change request. The client is unhappy. How do such delay affect the service quality? Delays create risk, legal exposure, client dissatisfaction, and operational confusion. The real world issue often escalates during the three weeks wait. This scenario shows how traditional governance can slow down the responsiveness while agility is critical. I compliance gap exists for three weeks, who would be held accountable, the client or us? And what if the team could act faster and redefine the flexibility? Building flexibility, small decisions can be made by empowering rules without derailing the structure. Suggest fast track approval for low risk and regulatory changes. Use examples like stand up meeting, and so on. Traditional management change is disruption. Lean change is built in the workflow. View change a chance to improve. 17. Introduction to Types of Waste: Anything that does not increase value in the eyes of the customer must be considered as waste. In this video, we're going to talk about MDA and eight types of waste that have been identified in lean manufacturing. And every effort should be made to eliminate these waste. We call these as eight deadly waste of lean. The eighth one is the most beautiful one, which we should definitely consider in today's world of AI. So without wasting any time, let's look at them in more detail. Eliminating waste was one of the core ideas of the founding fathers of the lean manufacturing, especially TahichiOo. He identified three major areas that negatively impact the work. Those are called as Muda, Muri, and Mura. Muda refers to waste. All the activities that do not add value is called as Muda. Before dividing the waste into eight types, it's also important for us to understand what waste actually means. Waste is any activity or any action or any step in the process that does not add value for the end customer. In other words, it's any process the customer would not be willing to pay for. Everything done in a company can be divided into two groups, value added activities, things that the customer pays for, and non value added activities are the things that the customer does not care about. If you look at typical organization, around 5% of the activities are value added activities while the remaining 95% are non value added activities. So what are customers paying us for? They pay us for value added activities, and that is why the goal is to reduce the non value added activities and focused on what really creates value. Len traditionally identifies eight different categories of waste, and we are going to summarize it with the acronym downtime. D for defects, O for overproduction, W for weighting, N for non utilized talent. T for transportation, I for inventory, M for motion, and E for excess processing. 18. Techniques for identifying waste: Techniques to identify waste in the process. FS methodology, TIM worth spaghetti diagram, Kison philosophy, Carb systems, bottleneck analysis, value stream mapping, at time calculation, visual management and performance dashboard, problem solving tools, root cause analysis with five and fishbone diagram, time and motion study. These are the different techniques that are available to identify the waste in the process and create value. We will uncover each one of them as we progress. 19. Transportation Waste: Et's now look at each one of the waste in more detail. The first waste stands for transportation waste. The downtime can also be called as Tim woods. These are just jumble alphabets arranged in an alphabetical order, which makes it easy for you to remember. So I would first take the waste as transportation waste. Transportation waste is any unnecessary movements of raw material, work in progress or finished goods. The movement itself adds no value. So it's important to minimize this transportation cost and avoid unnecessary movement of material which can deteriorate it. Movement of material and resources is a deadly waste. In Lewin, movement is important from delivery trucks to the machinery or the people involved. Transportation waste often forces the company to spend extra time, extra space, and equipments. The common causes of transportation waste are poor plant and or office layout, unnecessary or excessive processing steps. Misaligned process flow, poorly designed systems. Hence, how do we countermeasure transportation ways? We must do value stream mapping, design a linear sequential flow from raw material to finished goods. Continuous flow. Avoiding putting work in progress into inventory, maintaining a continuous flow of material. We should also explore the theory of constraints. Avoid constant changes in the job priorities. Now, in the next video, we will look at the second was. 20. Inventory Waste: Let's now look at each one of the waste in more detail. The second waste is inventory. Inventory waste is any excess raw material, work in progress or finished goods beyond what is needed to meet the immediate demand. Companies often hold just in case inventory to meet unexpected demands or protect against delays. But excessive inventory doesn't meet customer need and add storage and depreciation cost. Any material you have but aren't working on right now, it's a waste. You have paid for it, but it is just sitting in the inventory. It is adding to 50% to 60% of the total value through the carrying cost. Inventory hides inefficiencies, reducing it at uncovered improvement opportunities. The common cause for inventory is overproduction, misunderstood customer demand, long setup times, and poor monitoring. Sometimes we also have unreliable supplier. Hence we overstock. The countermeasure for this is to move from just in case to just in time philosophy. One piece flow, tack time, C bar, and SMED, single minute exchange of die. If we focus on this, we will be able to counter measure the inventory waste. In the next video, we will learn about motion waste. 21. Motion Waste: Let's now look at each one of the waste in more detail. The next type of waste which we are going to talk about is the motion waste. Motion waste is the unnecessary movement of people or machines that do not add value. It could include employees who are reaching, walking or moving more than necessary, which can lead to injuries, long production time, and inefficiencies and fatigue. The goal is to arrange the process so that the worker can do with little or unnecessary movement. They focus on the task to be done rather than just moving around. The common causes is a poor shop layout, congested workstation, lack of standards and isolated operations. How do we countermeasure motion waste? Five West system is the best way to handle it. Value stream mapping also comes to our rescue. One piece flow, better work and workforce planning. Remember, transportation waste is the waste where the material is moving. Motion waste is where the people are moving, the employees are moving. In case of a service industry, transportation waste would mean that you take a physical printout and send it by courier from one location to another. Was a motion waste could be moving the files between the folders unnecessarily. In the next video, we're going to learn about the weighting waste. 22. Waiting Waste: Let's now look at each one of the waste in more detail. In this video, we're going to talk about the waiting waste. Waiting occurs when someone in the process chain is delayed from taking the next step. They are faulting or slowing down the process. In lien, time is money and it is a serious principle. Waiting leads to lost momentum and wasted production time. Hence, this waste is very easy to recognize. Goods waiting to be delivered, equipment waiting to be repaired, staff waiting from the previous task to finish to start their work, sometimes waiting for the manager to approve your task. The common cause of the weighting waste is unbalanced workload, unplanned downtime, long setup times, inefficient or insufficient workforce. Poor quality process steps also add up to this. How do we countermeasure weighting waste? Continuous flow, standard operating procedures, SOPs, and value stream mapping. You see that we use VSM in attacking all types of waste. In the next video, we're going to talk about overproduction waste. 23. Over Production Waste: Let's now look at each one of the waste in more detail. Base f, overproduction. Overproduction means producing more than the customer's request or producing it even before it is needed. This leads to excess cost and triggers other ways like inventory, transportation, motion, and weighting. Overproduction ties up the capacity, material, time, and resources unnecessarily. You paid today for what you might need next week. And, the common cause for overproduction waste is just in case production strategy. Unclear customer demands, long setup times, production based on forecast and poorly applied automation. How do we countermeasure overproduction? Just in time production, aligning production with customers demand using the concept of tack time, cycle time, and lead time. Reduce setup time with SMED to allow smaller economical batches. In the next video, we're going to talk about overprocessing waste. 24. OverProcessing Waste: Let's now look at each one of the waste in more detail. Was six, overprocessing waste. Opcessing is performing more work, adding more features than the customer values or requires. This can include unnecessary features or tasks that increases the cost without increasing the value. Example, installing a TV screen in the truck of a car. Customer neither expect it nor is willing to pay extra for this. Sometimes we are busy changing the font colors of our PPT causing us over processing waste. The common cause for overprocessing waste is over designed equipments. Re entering or duplicating the data, misunderstood customer requirements. How do we countermeasure overprocessing waste? We compare the customer requires to the manufacturing specs. We simplify the process, we re evaluate the unnecessary steps, and last but not the least, value stream mapping comes to our rescue. In the next video, we're going to talk about defects. We have reached the waste number seven. 25. Defects Waste: Let's now look at each one of the waste in more detail. Was seven defects. Defect occurs when the production isn't fit for use or requires rework or scrapping or increasing the cost and consuming resources. We should be believing the concept of first time right. Defective products result in lost time, extra labor, tools, and sometimes dissatisfied customers inspection. The common cause for defects is poor quality control, excessive repairs, inadequate documentation, lack of standards, untrained workers. How do we countermeasure defects, mistake proofing or PkaokiGdoka, automation with a human touch, root cause analysis, and standardized work instruction. In the next video, we are going to talk about unutilized skills. Y 26. Talent Waste: Let's now look at each one of the waste in more detail. Waste eight unutilized. The most important type of waste that needs to be attacked is unutilized talent or skills. This waste relates to underusing the employee's capabilities, abilities, ideas and creativity. We often overlook this waste because it arises from poor management practices and the policies that limits the employee's contribution. The common causes are administrative tasks that waste time, poor communication, and lack of teamwork. Low employee motivation, insufficient training. The counter measure for unutilized skill set is to better or improve the communication channel, hire and develop the skilled workflows, provide appropriate training, and ensure the skill based job assignments. The goal of the lean manufacturing is to eliminate this eight waste, giving you a production system that has competitive advantage. While it's easy to identify these waste, removing them is much more challenging. Also remember not to neglect the two abs, Mura, that is unevenness, Muri that is overburden. They also negatively impact the performance of the team. Whether you are in a service industry or a manufacturing company, all of this you have in your process and you need to attack them. I will see you in the next video. Thank you. 27. Summary till Now: Course overview. Foundation and principle of six Sigma and lien. In this course, we will be introducing you to the foundation and principle of Six Sigma and LIN along with the values these quality and productivity improvement methodologies bring to the organization. We also cover the key lien tools commonly used in six Sigma projects and explain what is len, what is Six Sigma, and what is the integrated or a unified approach called lean Six Sigma. So what exactly is six Sigma? It all begin with an important metric defects per million opportunity. DPMO. DPMO is a scientific measure used to calculate the number of potential mistakes or defects in the delivery of products and services. This DPMO metric sits within the broader organizational system where six Sigma operates. The core competence of this system is the improvement methodology, which is known as the DMAC cycle, which stands for define, measure, analyze, improve, and control. So together, the metric and the DMAC process forms the foundation of Six Sigma projects. This enables the organization to systematically improve the business process of all time. Why do we need six Sigma? There are several compelling reasons to adopt. The Fruit track record of Six Sigma, which was popularized by Motorola and General Electrics in 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, the code techniques have been used to nearly a century and have been adopted by leading organization across the industry. The powerful tool kit, Six Sigma offers a structured methodology and a robot set of tools. It identifies and eliminates defects, reducing variation, and improving quality. Though it was born in manufacturing, this six sigma has been successfully applied in a wide range of industry, including financial services, government, non profit organizations, healthcare, logistics, and many more. Currently, even BPOs use Six Sigma from the last three decades. The key benefits of Six Sigma is that all organizations, whether they are for profit or non profit, everybody faces the challenge of controlling operating cost. While ensuring sustainable revenue growth, Six Sigma addresses these challenges very well. So what are the ways in which Six Sigma helps you manage this cost reduction? Six Sigma has a proven method called cost of poor quality, famously known as COPQ which is used. Six Sigma emphasizes on the voice of customer BOC, to understand the customer satisfaction level. We are aiming to reduce variation, eliminate inefficiency, and improve the process reliability. Six Sigma helps in profitability and long term value. By improving quality and efficiency, Six Sigma contributes to increased net profits to the organization and improve the value system in the organization. It builds a culture of continuous improvement. So when we focus on continuous improvement, Six Sigma ensures that the organization remains customer focused while enhancing internal capabilities. Process controls and process performances. You need to understand that DPMO and process performance are very important when it comes to Six Sigma projects. The concepts like DPMO is the fundamental basis for six Sigma. Once you can measure and capture the data, you can then check the chart performances, compare the actual results to a defined goal or mean. Evaluate deviation from statistical tools. By applying standard deviation, we access how process performs relative to its specification limit. Anything outside the upper and the lower specification limit is considered as out of spec and meets and it fails to meet the customer expectation, principle of six Sigma and lie. In this course, we will be introducing you to the foundation and principle of six Sigma and lie along with the values these quality and productivity improvement methodologies bring to the organization. 28. Quiz Lean tools and Techniques: Welcome back. In this lesson, we are going to learn about lean tools and techniques. Lean just isn't about cutting waste. It's about designing a system where inefficiency is impossible. You can name a few tools and concepts that you are aware of. Please write it down in the description section. What if you had tools to fix this? A banking client reports frequent data entry errors. Upon review, a few four different teams are touching the same form before it gets processed. Escalations are rising. What would you first check? Is it the agent training, process workflow, or ticket routing? How would you find the root cause? Please give the answer in the description section. The second scenario is a telecom client escalates because 15% of the customer queries are resolved incorrectly. The average handle time has increased by 30 seconds in the last month. What do you think is going wrong? What information would you need to fix it? And how often such multiple handoffs happen in your team? Please give me the answer in the description section below. The third scenario is that your team processes health insurance claims. Recently, SLA breaches have increased by 25%, mainly because the claims are bouncing back between teams multiple times. Where do you see the possible inefficiencies? Who should own the claims process, and why is it failing? To understand these scenarios much better, let's understand the tools. We start by identifying waste in the process, and there are eight specific types of waste we will learn to spot and eliminate. These are the first steps to lean a day in the life of an agent. A customer sends an email, a ticket is created. It's assigned to a wrong team. It gets reassigned. Agent raises queries due to unclear SOPs. Customer follows up twice and the final resolution after two days. Let's wear the lean lens. What's going wrong? Where's the waiting time? Where is the rework? Where's unnecessary movements, and is the customer experience smooth? 29. 5s With a game: The five s system. Let's understand the five S. The first one is the SOT. It is the initial step. SOT is about eliminating unnecessary items from the workspace to foster a more efficient environment. Set in order set in order is concerned with arranging the remaining items for better accessibility and enhanced workflow. She shine the stress the importance of cleaning the workplace to uphold the safe and efficient environment. We need to standardize, that is the fourth S because if we develop the guidelines and procedures, it will ensure that the learning that we did from the first three S are sustained. To the concluding step is sustenance, guarantees that the enhancement are preserved over time through consistent audits and assessment. So how do we implement fives at workplace? The first S is about removing unnecessary files and outdated emails or redundant tools. Example, you can archive the old customer records in the call center. The second one is set in order, SitonOganizing workspace or digital systems for easy access, standardized Bhlder structure for IT service request. Shine, CSO, maintain a clean functional workspace, implementing a clean desk policy and regular system maintenance. Standardize, sit sit SG so, standardize, Set so, create AOPs checklist and automation for consistency. A uniform email response template for customer service. Sustained embed the five into company culture through training and audits. Monthly FIS audit in banking support team can ensure that whatever we have implemented in the first four are sustained. Um, how do you implement FIS? It's important to train the employees for successful implementation of FIS. This will ensure understanding and following the practice. Regular audits, conducting regular audits helps maintain high standards of cleanliness and organization. This is ensuring adherence to the FIS principle. Culture of continuous improvement encourages employees to regularly seek ways to enhance efficiency and productivity. Now that we learned about five, it's time for us to play a game to understand this concept really well. Are you ready? The game is about finding the digits. You need to find the numbers in the order of one to 49, and the time given to you is 20 seconds. My clock is ready, right? You understood the task. The task is to find one to 49 in the 20 seconds. Let's get started. I have ticked off the timer. You need to start finding. Please ensure you go in a sequence. First, find the letter one, then two, then three, and so on. Please don't jump directly to 86 or 69. You target is only to stop at 49. Great. Time is up. What did you understand? How many of you were able to find the number 49 or the first digit. Let's implement the first S. So we need to now implement the fives. The first S is to sort. The purpose of SOT is to eliminate any unnecessary numbers that do not add value. Our target is only to find the numbers one to 49. The numbers 50-90 are only distractions. Hence, I have already removed these numbers and you will have to find the number of one to 49 in a sequence. I hope you are ready. I have set the timer three, two, one. Stop. Go. Please write in the common section. How much did you identify? We were much better than the first round. It's time for us to go to the implementation of the second, that is set in order, organized for efficient flow. I'm going to put the numbers in a checker box. One is on the left bottom box, two is on the left middle box, and three is on the left top box. Our target would be to find the number four, which would be in the middle bottom box, and so on. Are you ready to start the game? You get the same 20 seconds to find it. Let's go. 10 seconds up. Tell me where did you reach? I think after the implementation of seconds, you would have reached a better number than your first and the second round. Now, let's implement the third S. Let's sign and standardize the process. We will order the number in a standard way. This will ensure that we are able to organize it in a more better way. I'll give you 20 seconds, and you please tell me within how much time you were able to identify all the 49 numbers 1-49 in a sequence. I think most of you would have done in the first three, 4 seconds. Why? Because the numbers are arranged in a sequence, you just had to scan your eyes and you would not need the entire 20 seconds to do this process. Isn't it wonderful? I would go ahead and standardize the numbers to be of the same size, reducing the strain on the eyes of the people, the employees who are working. This would also ensure that I'm able to see a certain sequence of numbers in any order. Hence, understand the importance of the five S. This game would have definitely helped you understand the practical way of implementing fives at your workplace. Finally, the most important thing, sustain. This isn't about just one time cleanup. The challenge is keeping it in this way, daily habits, team habits, regular checks, everyone on board to implement fibers into the culture. This was a great example. 30. Spaghetti diagram step by step: Spaghetti diagram we use for visualizing the flow and waste like motion waste, weighting waste, redundancy waste, rework waste. So we want to go from kiosk to clarity. It's a lean practitioner guides for moment mapping. Why visual tool matter in lean? We have data which says task one, two, three, four are done in 10 minutes each. When you go to the reality, you see how the people are moving across the floor to complete their task. So standard metrics hide the physical struggle. A visual map exposes it. So we will do this by a simple method. First, we will define an understanding of the Spaghetti diagram and how did it origin. We will pick up some use cases from the shop floor to the digital workflow. Then we will build a step by step mapping guide, and finally, we will do the analysis of identifying waste and redesigning the process. So what exactly is the Spaghetti diagram? It's a visual flow tracing the continuous physical movement of people material information through the process. The name is literal. If the map is a mess, the process is a mess. Just like the spaghetti noodles in a plate, the people are moving around in the office in the same way. Why is it called a Spaghetti diagram? A chaotic activity is crystallized in a clear concrete form. An SOPs a standard operating procedure says it's a straight line, but the actual expectation is to go around the people to find something. A diagram captures their complexity of movement and it's often invisible to the management. It reveals a hidden factory of work overload. So Robert Mono of workaround searching and waiting. The core purpose is to identify the full culprits in the process, the motion ways, unnecessary movements of people or searching for tools, transportation waste, unnecessary moments of material, Waiting waste, idle time caused by the flow interruption, backtracking, returning to the previous location due to the poor layout. So the lean waste is linked to movement, motion, transportation and weighting, people moving without adding value like the Spaghetti diagram, excessive foot traffic and searching. Product moving without adding value, unnecessary material handling and long routing. Stagnation points where the line clutters because we can easily see the bottleneck, idle time, and the flow interruption. The goal of lean is to eliminate these waste to improve the flow. The difference between a process flowchart and a Spaghetti diagram is this that the process flowchart is logical shows how the process should work, whereas a Spaghetti diagram is physical. It shows how the process actually works. So a flowchart is very good when you're thinking about sequence, a Spaghetti diagram maps the geography. Where it fits in the lean toolkit. The Spaghetti diagram is a process analysis tool. It acts as step zero for layout redesign. You may be using value stream mapping, five as layout, archives and events. This will be the first step. It provides the current state reality check before the VSM. It visualizes safety hazard and congestion. If you think about a manufacturing shop floor, an operator running between the machine and the tools, high motion, fatigue, safety risk. The target is to move the tools closer to point of use. A paper flow versus a digital handoff, redundant approvals, sneaker net waiting, teams and streamlining the digital routing. If I pick up example from healthcare, a clinician's movement has to be tracked. You could identify ways like reduced patient care time, staff burnout. Our target is to decentralize the supplies to the patient room. Let's understand the process of building a Spaghetti diagram step by step. The first step is to map the area. We draw the current layout to scale, like the inner front. We include the walls, the furnitures, equipment, and obstacles. Why? Because that will show the actual work that happens. Do not guess walk the floor to verify the layout. The step two is to collect the moment data. You identify the people by different colors. Quote and do the Gemba at the actual floor. Use different colors for different people or different items. Here I'm taking the operator A as blue and the material as red. We observe the real time moment and we do not rely on our memory to draw this. We actually see it when we are doing the Gemba. Trace it continuously. Trace the exact path, including the loops, the hesitations, and the backtracking. If they stop to talk or wait, circle the spot to identify a delay. The golden rule is do not lift your pen. Measure. Though it's an optional step, my suggestion would be to measure the distance and the time it takes because you turn the picture into data by measuring the total distance traveled, measure the time per cycle, and calculate the percentage of non value added activities. We then analyze the diagram and look for congestions or bottlenecks or waiting time, excessive transportation of material, and a spider web for searching and confusion. These patterns help us identify where is the problem. A hint is to look for the ink, which is the darkest. How do we link the patterns to waste? If it's a back tracking, we see that the loop is going off. The type of waste is a motion waste or the poor sequence. Congestion is about weighting waste and imbalanced, a long transit of transportation or poor layout. This visual cues are the trigger for root cause analysis. Before we might have a lot of walking, creating cellular layout, point to use storage, and combine to eliminate the handoff. A 31. Do's and Don't of Spaghetti Map: The dos and the dons of the spaghetti diagram. Small mistakes hide big insights. Spaghetti diagrams are the simple but most powerful tool for visualizing flow. However, poor execution leads to misleading conclusions. This guide ensures your observation captures the reality of work, not just the theory. Spaghetti diagram revolves around the motion waste, hiding in the plain side, but only if done correctly, assumptions and shortcuts weakens the outcome. We often think workflow is a straight line, but reality is that it's a series of loops and interruptions. The first do is follow the actual movement. Never assume the path. Observe it. If I take the case study of the claims office, the assumption is the flights are transferred digitally. When you go and observe, you might see that the agent has walked to the other floor five times a day to deliver the printouts. The fix is digital sharing implemented, removing travel instantly. We walked this path 20 times a shift. Engage the people doing the work. The operator knows the truth of the process. The nurse maps their own movement between the pharmacy, the lab, and the ward. You are a visitor in their workspace. People doing the work are the experts. In a hospital study, it wasn't the consultant who found the waste. It was the nurses. By engaging them, they identified the waste steps from lab to the ward, and this added up to 40 minutes every single shift. That 40 minutes given bang for the patient care. Let's understand the concept of color coding and measuring. If we use different colors to separate role, material and shift in the service sector, it could be as data, information, people, so it can help us identify the different types of movements. 2 hours lost per week. Don't guess the duration. Use the stopwatch and the pedometers. Small 5 minutes delay often aggregates 2 hours of lost productivity. Details matter. First, use the color to separate the variables, tracking a new hire versus a senior agent. This can reveal training gaps immediately. Second, measure everything. 5 minutes walk seems harmless. But in a service industry, those trips add up to two full hours of lost productivity per agent per week. Look for patterns and get the buy in. You can look at the map. Don't just look at the longest line. Look at the knots, the small movement repeated 100 times. These are the frustrations of life and crucially ensures leadership is informed before you start. We need alignment to ensure that the exercise is safe and supported. Don't draw through the walls are the machines. Don't shorten the route to save drawing efforts, capture the geometry of the real route. Now the don'ts, it's tempting to draw the straight line to keep your map looking tidy. Don't do it. If the operator walks around the partition or a machine, your line should also walk around it, too. If you draw through the wall, you are deleting the data about the distance they actually travel. Don't skip or add the noise. Even a minor moment matters. Repeated small steps like reaching out to the printer, switching desks, switching the tabs reveal the process patterns. Don't map personal time, exclude restrooms, cafeterias or personal walks. Focus strictly on work related to process flows to maintain the data integrity. Before you heard out, let's review our checklist. Are we observing the real path? Are the operators involved? Do you have the colors and the timers ready? And most importantly, does the leadership know we are doing this? If you can check these boxes, you are ready to map. I want to leave you with a question. Think about your day. If this is a small annoying task, you do ten times a day, walking to a printer, switching the screen. If we map your day, what would it look like? We are doing this exercise to remove the frustrations for others. Let's go and find the flow. 32. Spaghetti Diagram Showing Invisible cost: Spaghetti diagram, seeing the moment you never noticed. As you know, it's a very simple lean tool to uncover hidden waste in service and operations. We know spaghettis are the noodles which are very much entangled. We need a smooth flow. The invisible cost of work. Have you ever wondered how much unnecessary movements happen in your workplace, just to get one task done? We rarely count the steps, clicks or the screen switch, but they add up to the hours and lost productivity. We need to have an X ray vision for operations. If we start mapping the moment along, and it could reveal the waste instantly without any fancy softwares. You don't need expensive consultants. You just need to see the flow. The benefit of doing a Spaghetti diagram is that it helps us in checking the reality and getting things done. How many steps to print or approve one document? How often do you walk back and forth for a simple task? Do your process look efficient or does it look like a spaghetti? So what exactly is a Spaghetti diagram? As you can see, the noodles or the spaghetti on the left hand side, these are the real spaghettis. And when you are walking down on your floor to complete a task and you are moving around like a spaghetti, this can help you understand it. So it's a visual tool that can map the actual path of a person product, or a piece of information. It captures the messy reality for physical or digital moments. It's a mindset shift because it's not about drawing with perfect straight lines. We're not seeing perfection. It is to see the flow honestly. The core question is, can we do this in a smarter way? Let's understand the eight steps path to clarity from identifying the problem to sustaining the solution. Define the objective, map the workspace, track the movement, draw the diagram, analyze the mess, propose the improvements, test it, and update all the people. It's a very simple eight step process which can help you implement easy flow of work, remove the spaghetti and the mess in the work. So let's get into each of the step in detail. The first step is to define the objective. We identify the process and clarify the goal. So the process can be a patient intake form, invoice approval, and so on. We clarify the goal, we reduce the distance, improve the response time, and reduce the handoff. How do I map the workspace? Sketch the physical or the digital layout, including the desk office printers, coffee stations, and software interfaces. The step three is to track the moment. Observe the real moment. Don't guess watch with your eyes. It's a tip to use color coded for the flow. So you are going to sit with color pencils. People movement with red color, material movement with the blue color, and information moment with the green color. Step four is to draw the diagram. Trace the actual path continuously. Expectation is messy lines is equal to success. Reality is it should look like a bowl of spaghetti. Because that's the real story. Step five is to analyze the mess. Look for the loops. Are you redoing the work? Look for the long distances. Is the equipment too far away? Look for the back and forth. Are we missing tools at the desk? Look for the bottlencks. Where do lines overlap or stop? Step six is to propose improvement. Rearrange, move the workstations, or the equipment logically, redesign, change the workflow to minimize the handoff, digitalize, use technology to bridge the physical gap. The goal is to straighten the lines. Step seven and eight, you have to test the pilot and update it. So try the new layout for a week, learn, measure the difference in terms of improved productivity, reduced fatigue, and improved employee morale, and remap if there is any changes required, update it and let everybody be educated on the new flow. Individual reflection. If someone tracked your steps today, how many would be non value adding steps? For a team discussion, where does your team waste the most moment? Do you design for convenience or do you design it for efficiency? Beyond manufacturing is the service with AI. The Spaghetti diagram is also relevant for hospitals, banks, IT supports, and shared offices. The new frontier about combining lean observation with generative AI insights. Let's take up the first case. I want to do an initial process analysis for IT helpdesk ticket workflow. I see that there's a Tier one, Tier two, Tier three, Tier four network and database. The ticket is going through all these things in an entangled way. We need a structured flow. Ticket enters, AI does the routing, automates the resolution, human agent, and he gets closed. The challenge is mapping how a support ticket moves across the department. A lean view is identifying excessive handoffs and a generative AI boost is that I use AI to convert text based SOP or a chat log into a visual process map automatically. Let's take another example of diagnostic lab, how I can improve the efficiency by scaling the operations. Optimize the technician moment as sample volume doubles. The lean view would be restructuring the layout to prevent collision and delay. A generative AI post would be simulate the future layouts and traffic jam based on projected growth data. Let's take the clinic check in redesign process. The challenge was validating that the new layout actually works. A N would do a pre versus post change moment. A generative AI analyzes the IoT sensor data to instantly generate before versus after moment comparison. Insurance claim processing. We have to identify delays in the claim approval process. A lean view would be highlighting documents sitting idle with waiting waste. A generative AI boost analyzes the timestamp in log to highlight the boerlin suggest optimized path, partnership of AI and lien. It's an integrated human insight and machine precision. AI analyzes the pattern and processes data at scale. Lien defines a value and ensures the flow serves the customer. The results are faster inside, smarter decision. Um. 33. Kaizen Daily Continuous Improvement: What is Kaizen? It means change for better. This comes from the Japanese philosophy of two words, Thai, which means change and Zen, which means good. It is not a one time project, but a culture of sustained continuous improvement. The core belief is that the person doing the work is the expert. Everyone has the ability to improve their own process every single day. Focus on making the work easier, safer and more valuable by finding and solving small everyday problems with your own wisdom and not large investment. The power of small step is that how gradual change creates a major impact. Kaizen focuses on small, gradual incremental changes applied over a long period of time. Major breakthroughs are the results of thousands of tiny improvements accumulated over time. It's an ongoing effort on improve upon the status quo. Consistency over intensity. A 1% improvement every day leads to exponential growth in efficiency and quality. Emphasize on low cost, low risk ideas implemented by the team. Then 1% ideas are better than a 10% mandate. Seeing with new eyes, we need to identify the waste and the strain or overburden in our processes. Waste is any activity that consumes resources but adds no value to the customer. When we overburden our people and system that leads to burnout and error is an example of MI or strain. We can see that a claims processing workflow involves correcting billing code error, resulting in rework, system response lag, making the people wait, searching for the policy file, and a mental fetti for the screen toggling. But after Kaizen, an ideal claim processing, after eliminating Muda and Muri, it becomes a straight through process. The Kaizen mindset is a scientific approach to problem solving. Kaizen is rooted in scientific analysis, not guesswork. It's about understanding how a process works to discover how to improve it. It's about going to the source and asking the why replacing this is how we have always done it with how we can do it better. The action cycle is observe, identify, ideate, and implement. Study the current process at micro level. Identify pinpoints at a specific source of Muda or Modi. IDA generates a simple idea to eliminate, combine or specify or simplify. Test the idea on a small scale and if it works, standardize it. The foundation of IN is where KISN operational excellence begins. KISN is not a standalone initiative. It's essential building block for a lean organization because daily problem solving by everyone is a KisN culture, which indirectly supports the lean principle of value, pull and flow, and which ultimately results in operational excellence of higher quality and accuracy, faster turnaround time, improved employee morale and lowest possible cost. So Lean is a management philosophy focused on maximizing customer value by relentlessly eliminating waste. If Lean is a goal, Tyson is the engine of daily improvement that powers that energy. A strong Kison culture is the path to achieve key business results, higher quality accuracy, faster turnaround time, improved employee morale, and lowest possible cost. Leading the change, how to foster the Kaizen mindset? Because the Kaizen culture depends upon leader who encourages, not blocks the idea. Avoid these mental blocks. We are too busy to look at it now. It's a good idea, but it's not in the budget. I have tried that before, and it will fail. That's not your area. Let someone else think about it. Embrace these actions. Question everything. Ask why about current practices. Focus on how to make an idea work, not why it can't work. So think on how to. Implement a good idea now. Correct mistake as you go. Don't seek perfection. Empower your team. It's a great idea. How can I support you? Instead of saying it's your idea and your baby. 34. From Silos to Flow: The illusion of progress. When every team is winning, why isn't there a progress? Or our department is hitting their targets. Example, Claims intake processing speed has gone up by 15%. Billing and coding team accuracy improved by 10%. Compliance review throughput increase by 12%. We celebrated the isolated team victories. The paradoxes, despite this, our end to end claim to case cycle has not been improved. The customer is still frustrated. So the total claim to cash cycle is 45 days. There is no change. Seeing the white space, where 90% of your lead time is hiding, it could be the queue waiting time in terms of Moda, or it could be a rework loop, which is a mode of rework and transportation. So as you can see in the diagram, the claim intake takes a value added time of 3 hours, but the waiting queue is for eight days. Again, the billing and coding team works with a value added time of 5 hours, but the rework loop is for three days clarifying questions. And finally, the compliance check where the value added time is 2 hours. So technically, it's a 10 hours value added time, but the customer is experiencing a 12 to 13 days of delay. Our problem isn't the value added time within your team. It's the non value added time like Moda between our teams. The purpose of VSM is to eliminate this entire end to end flow and make the wasteful wide space impossible to ignore. Your process is your product. A VSM sees what the customer feels. A customer don't experience our department. They experience a single unified process. A fragmented internal flow creates a broken external experience, unpredictable turnaround time, multiple follow up calls seeking status updates, inconsistent information from different departments. VSM is the only tool that maps the journey from the customer's point of view, from their initial request to the final value delivery. As you can see, when you look at the internal view diagram, there is a lot of rework and information gap between the process flow. The customer view is that our customer journey view is that application is submitted, there is blank. Then he makes a status call for one. Again, he waits, he makes the status call two, and the account gets activated. So understand that the rework and information gap within our process is not giving a good experience to the customer. The system trap. Why making one team faster can make everything else slow? Because there's a concept called as Mura or imbalance, which indirectly results in Muri or overburden and strain. Maybe you have a good data entry process and you have automated it. The Senior authorization review is the bottleneck and the final processing, waiting for the work to arrive. The system performance is limited by its single biggest constraint, the bottleneck. Making a non bottleneck department faster doesn't improve the overall turnaround time. It creates a bigger backlog for the bottleneck, causing more or imbalance in the system. This increases the Mori on the bottleneck team, leading to burnout, errors, and even longer lead times. The blueprint of the truth system wide improvement, we need to focus on the place where there's a bottleneck. Pinpoint the single constraint truly impacting the turnaround time. Align all the teams by creating a shared goal, improving the end to end flow that transcends departmental silos. Focuses on investment, guides where to spend the time and resources for the greatest system wide impact, avoiding the wasted effort. Connect our work to customer value. VSM helps us to stop from making improvements that don't matter to the person waiting for our service. 35. Kaizen Culture Playbook for Operations: Building your Kaizen culture, a practical playbook for BPO and healthcare operations. The first step, make it safe to suggest. Continuous improvement begins when people feel safe enough to question the status quo. The initial goal is to not break through the ideas but building the habit of participation. Observable behaviors. Leaders actively ask teams. What's the most frustrating part of your work today? Team hurdles have a dedicated five minute slot for process pain points. No idea is dismissed publicly. The response is always thanks for sharing it. Let's explore that. If I think about some examples from the healthcare or a BPO context, instead of saying, why is the HD so high on this call type? Try to say, I noticed this call type takes longer. What are the systems road blocks you are hitting? Create a simple visible system of ideas. The easier it is to submit an idea, the more ideas you will get. Remove fiction from the process. Bad systems have high friction, good systems have low friction. Let's understand a bad system first. It could be a multi page form requires manager pre approval, and ideas go back to the black box with no feedback. A good system would be something where we have a dedicated slack or team channel like hash Kays and ideas. A simple digital form with two questions. What is the problem and what is your idea to fix it? All suggestions are visible on shared digital Carbon board with the status, idea reviewing, testing and done. In the beginning, reward the participation, not the perfection. To build momentum, the first win must be celebrated visibly and shared with the team. This creates a positive feedback loop. The source material highlights a critical rule for starting out. In the initial stage, whatever benefits is coming through Kison, it should be distributed to promote the very purpose of the activity. Practical examples, a small idea. An agent creates a simple email template for a common query, seeing 30 seconds per interaction. Reward the team. The team leader recognizes the agent in the daily huddle. The small time savings are pooled for a team funded coffee break or lunch. Organizational rewards, implemented ideas are featured in a weekly internal newsletter with the photos of the person and team who suggested. Now, we train the teams to see what's hidden. Once people are actively participating, it's time to provide them with mental models to identify high impact improvement opportunities. The Kison is the culture of sustained continuous improvement, focusing on eliminating waste in all systems and processes. So coming back, a culture of sustained continuous improvement, focusing on eliminating waste in all systems and processes. In our world, it means finding and fixing small, frustrating things that add time and clicks, but don't help the patient or the customer. It's about making our own work easier and more effective. Learning the language of waste, Muda, Mura, or Muri waste, inconsistency and overburden, Muda or waste, activities that add cost and time, but no value. Example, waiting waste for manager's approval for processing high value claims. The other Muda could be excessive motion, toggling between four different screens to answer one patient queries. Rework or defect, correcting the data entry errors on the patient intake form. Over processing waste, a five step quality check for a task that is already at a 99.8% first pass yield. MRA inconsistency, variation and imbalance in the process. One agent is overwhelmed with the complex cases while another only gets simple one. End of month reporting causes a massive spike in the workload and stress. Muri are overburdened putting unreasonable stress on people and systems, expecting one agent to meet their call handling KPI while navigating a slow crashing CRM. The simple toolkit for generating the ECRS ideas. You don't need complex methodologies to start. Ask four simple questions about any frustrating task. E, eliminate. Can we get rid of this step completely? Example, removing a redundant approval field on a travel reimbursement form. C, combine. Can we merge this step with another one? Example, combining patient demographics and insurance verification into one screen or reduce or rearrange. Can we do less on this or change the sequence? Example, shortening a mandatory call script by 10 seconds. Simplify, can we make this easier step? Creating a browser bookmark folder for the five most knowledge based article? Making it stick, refresher training and impartial coaching. Knowledge fades with time. Culture is to build through consistent reinforcement and fair evaluation of ideas, continuous learning, refresher training. Short 15 minute session in team meeting focuses on one type of waste. This week, we hunt for Moda of waiting, peer to peer sharing. Even team members who implement a successful Kison present there before and after to the team. The source emphasizes the necessity of impartial evaluation. A team leader's role as a coach, evaluate the ideas based on its logic and potential impact on the process. Please don't favor ideas from senior members or dismiss ideas from the new hires. Parity will stop employees from giving suggestions in the future. Rising the bar from small fixes from small fixes to systematic improvements. As the culture matures, we shift focus from quantity of ideas to the quality and impact of implemented solution. The next level analysis a claim denial rate, first call resolution, and patient satisfaction. We need a small fix. So before implementing a KISN, we should review the standardization step. Can this new method be performed consistently by everyone? We have to check for the widespread application. If this works for Team A, can it be applied to Team B and Team C? Alignment. Does this involvement help us meet our key objectives? Example, reduce claim denial rate, improve first call resolution. Maintaining focus. What is not a Kison? Defining clear boundaries prevent a program from being diluted with suggestions that aren't true process improvement. Let's understand some common things which are not a KISN. Fixing a typo in the patient record you just entered. KISN would be a system that changes or prevents the typo error. Personal request asking for a new chair or a change in company policy on breaks is not a KISN. Obvious or regular maintenance, cleaning your desktop files is not a KISN. An unimplemented idea. An idea is just a suggestion. A KISN is an implemented improvement. Copying a previous Kison, resubmit an idea that is already being implemented. How leaders nurture Kison, the dos. Your response as a leader determines whether an employee will bring you another idea in the future. Embrace these behaviors as a leader, challenge the current standards. Always ask the question, why do we do it this way? Is there a better way? Think how to do it, not why it can't be done. Focus energy on finding a path to implementation. Don't seek perfection. A small implemented improvements now is better than a perfect plan next year. As the source says, if you make a mistake, correct it that time. Focus on wisdom, not money. Challenge the team to find solution using existing resources and their own ingenuity first. How leaders kill Kison the don'ts. These common phrases, often said without ill intent can instantly shut down employee engagement and destroy psychology safety. It's a good idea, but the timing isn't right. We are too busy to look at it right now. It's not in this year's budget. I tried something similar before and it failed. That's not your area of responsibility. It's your idea, so it's your baby. I won't take responsibility if it fails. This kills the idea of Kison. How do we lock the gains from idea to a new standard? An improvement is only temporary until it becomes a new documented way of working for everyone. Otherwise, people naturally revert to the old process. First is to test and refine. The new method is tested by a small group to document. A successful method is documented simply and visually. Three, train. All affected team members are trained on the new standard. Four, update. All documents and old documentation is archived. New process is now the way we work. The power of visual one page SOP. The best documentation is created by people who do the work, for the people who do the work, it should be clear, concise, and easy to follow. Created by the people and for the people. So before Kison, a ten page word document with long paragraphs and tasks. No screenshots or diagrams out of date, told in a confusing share drive. After Kison, a single laminated page or a clean PDF uses a simple flow chart or numbered steps, includes annotate screenshots for key actions, accessible from a central, easy to find knowledge base. Spreading success from one team to the entire process. The true value of ISN is unlocked when local improvement is scaled to a global standard. A dedicated team or a GiSN champion regularly review implemented improvements for wider applicability. They share the success stories actively through demos, newspaper and internal forums. We adopt and adapt. A team in a patient scheduling sees a macro development by claim processing. They adapt it to their new needs and adopt the improvement. Isn flywheel, a self sustaining culture of improvement. Kisn is not a program you finish. It's a cycle. One spinning builds its own momentum. Encourage participation, more ideas are generated. To train and equip the quality of idea improves. Three, implement quality solutions. Tangible business results are achieved. Four, standardize and share the baseline for performance is raised. The new standard becomes the next starting point for the improvement. The goal is to make small improvement parts of everyone's job and every single day. 36. Kaizen Leadership Two Paths: And leaders to path, choosing a culture of progress over a habit of stagnation. Your mindset is the system. Kaizen is not a suggestion box or a one time project. It's a culture of sustained continuous improvement. For leaders in service organizations, the success of this culture depends entirely on the mindset they model. Your response is a new idea either built a path to progress or a wall to stagnation. Every interaction is a choice. The concept over here is that the source material identifies the eighth form of waste beyond the traditional seven unused human talent or human intellect. When leaders create a meltal block, they are actively choosing to waste their team's most valuable resource, their brain. The wall of no resources, why busy and broke are the traps. The two most common improvement killers are phrases that sound like responsible management but are actually admission or failure. We are too busy to study this right now. There is no time to fix the process, and hence the process is broken. The consequences of statement like we are too busy precisely because your process is broken. Refusing to pause and fix the leak ensures that you are bailing the water forever. Your team is sentenced to permanent firefighting. This is not in this year's budget. This is a very bad statement for a leader to make because you are prioritizing money over ideas. The consequences, you misunderstand Kaizen core principle. It prioritizes wisdom over wallet. By waiting for a budget, you ignore the countless low cost, high impact improvements your team could make right now using the existing resources. Let me give you a practical illustration. A team is buried with redundant data entry for client reports. The no resource leader says, We can't afford automation software. The Kaizen leader asks, How can we simplify this report using our existing tools to eliminate 80% of the manual work? The silos of indifferences. It's not my job. In an interconnected service delivery model, it's not my problem, it's a dangerous solution. When a leader deflates ownership, they become the bottom neck. It's not our business, let someone else think about it. Do your job, let this be implemented by another department. We are not affected that much by this. This creates a culture of finger pointing and learned helplessness. Teams optimize their individual task, even if it harms the overall client experience. Good ideas that require cross functional supports are guaranteed to fail, and eventually people stop suggesting improvements. As a leader, if an improvement touches your sphere of influence, that is definitely your job. The throne of ego wasting your team's brainpower. People doing daily work possesses a level of practical knowledge no manager can match. Dismissing their insight is a strategic blunder. Remember, employees don't just bring two hands to work. They get their brain also. So are you teaching me I'm your boss? Is a killer phrase. Please avoid it. When you pull rank, you activate the eighth waste unused human intellect. You are left with only one mind, yours, trying to solve problems that require the entire team's perspective. Your authority doesn't come from having all the answers. It comes from creating an environment where the big ideas and the best ideas can win regardless of who those ideas came from. The path of progress is adapting the Kaizen mindset. The alternative path is built not on the budget or authority, but on the mindset of curiosity and action. A Kaizen leader understands that a small gradual incremental changes applied over a long period, adding up to a major impact on business results. They transform their role from gatekeeper to an accelerator. The core shift is why it won't work. Two, how can we make it work? The focus on obstacles shifts to the focus on solution. From being a gatekeeper of resource, you become a facilitator of wisdom. Hoding control is replaced by sharing knowledge and enabling others from seeking perfection to making progress. Waiting for the perfect plan is abandoning the continuous improvement culture. Start with the Y, question every idea that is fixed. A Kaizen leader refuses to accept because we have always done it this way. It's a valid answer. They create psychological safety for their teams to relentlessly question the current practices and standard. The consequence of not asking why is institutionalized inefficiencies. You carry the baggage of yesterday into tomorrow. When we make curiosity a core value, you give your team a license to eliminate that waste. Why does this approval process take five steps? Can it be two? Why do we create this weekly report? Who reads it, and what decision do they make with it? Is there an alternative, simpler way to onboard this client? Make execution happen? Progress over perfection. Do you seek perfection in the first go? A 70% solution implemented today is definitely more valuable than 100% solution that never materialized. The goal is to make small measurable improvements now and build from there. The leadership language is that instead of saying we need more data before we can try this, please ask the question. What is the smallest and the fastest version of this idea that we can test by Friday. Don't make excuses. Make execution happen. If you make a mistake, correct it that time. Waiting for a perfect plan guarantees inaction. Your competitors who are willing to be 70% right and learn quickly will race past you. Lead with wisdom, not your wallet. The first answer to any problem should be What can we buy, but what can we simplify, combine or eliminate with our current resources? This forces higher level of creativity and critical thinking. In Kaizen, don't focus on spending money. Focus on your wisdom and use your mind. This is a very beautiful diagram. The wallet approach, our team is disorganized. We need to buy expensive project management software. The wisdom approach will be let's diagnose our workflow issues first. Can we create a simple visual carbon board on our shared digital whiteboard to clarify project status? It cost nothing, and it can implement it this afternoon. And we can implement this. We can implement it this afternoon. A wallet first approach creates a bloated, expensive and complex operation. A wisdom first approach builds a lean, agile, intelligent organization. Two destinies compounding stagnation versus compounding improvement. If I go with the enthropic view, employ disengagement, client frustration, rising cost, and mis opportunities. If I go with compounding improvement side, I can see team empowerment, process efficiency, higher quality service, sustainable growth. TISN is the effect of small gradual changes compounding over time. As a leader, your daily mindset choices are not small things. They are everything. They determine which path your organization flows. 37. Kaizen Service Improvement Reframed: ISN lens a practical guide to finding daily improvements in service operations. Tyson factory floor is now your digital workspace. The core principle of Kison is to eliminate waste, inconsistency and strain, and it's universal. The challenge is translating them from the factory floor to the service environment. This guide provides a practical framework to do just that. The machine, the material, and the manpower. Your software, ID systems, and digital tools are the machine. The material is your cases, your tickets, customer files, and the data. The manpower is your team, which is your talent, focus, and the cognitive energy. The three enemies of efficiency, strain that is overburdened, inconsistency or Mura and waste Muda, Muri or strain. Remember it, Muri strengths with I and strain also has I Muri, unreasonable stress on people and systems leads to burnout, errors and downtime. Think of systems that constantly slow or a process that requires excessive mental effort. MRA is inconsistency or imbalance. Variation in your process or system performance leads to unpredictable results and waiting. Think of workloads that swing widely between teams or tickets, resolving items that are all over the map. Muda or waste, any activity that consumes resources but adds no value to the customer, the sources of delay and unnecessary cost. A map for improvement. The six scope areas of KISN is service, manpower efficiency, system and tools, process and workflow, workplace safety, work item utilization, and quality control. When we talk about manpower efficiency, we are thinking about maximizing the value of the human talent. When we focus on system and tools, we want to ensure that our digital machines run smoothly. Process and workflow is about designing efficient path from work to flow. Protecting against physical or digital harm is the core of workplace safety. Optimizing the material you work with is about work item utilization. Building excellence into every work item is the goal of quality control. Let's dive into each one of them. Manpower efficiency. Focus on human talent on high value work, not digital friction. Manpower efficiency isn't about working harder. It's about removing the obstacle that waste time and mental energy. It targets the mod, waste of searching, waiting, and redoing the work, and Mori or the strain of confusion and physically taxing task. The key question is, where are we spending our team's valuable time on activities that don't directly help our customers? Finding and fixing manpower waste. A common ways to look for is searching. Are your team members looking for right tool, right knowledge based articles, or customer file across multiple systems? Observe for excess motion, something like unnecessary clicks, screen switching or navigating on a poorly designed UI, waiting and idling for slow systems to load for information from other team or for approvals. Rework correcting errors, reopening tickets due to incomplete information or redoing the task. Conveyance, manually copying and pasting data between systems instead of using integration. Understand this that Muda is more easy to find in a manufacturing plant floor than in a service industry. Hence, you need to be smart. So the guys and ideas so the question to ask in the ECRS methodology would be, can we create a single source of truth? Can we automate this data transfer? Can two separate tools be integrated into one dashboard? Can we reduce the number of clicks to complete a common task? Can we create a simple checklist for complex tickets to prevent rework? System and tool maintenance. You tools are your machines. They need continuous improvement. In service operations, system downtime, slow performance, and minor glitches are equivalent to a machine breakdown on the factory floor. These issues create MODA waiting, Mory strain, indirectly impacting the team's ability to perform. The key question over here is what small recurring system issues are we just living with which are silently killing our productivity? From minor glitches to major gains. The common ways to look for is there a coolant leak, slow performance, memory hogs, applications that need frequent restarting. Login failure, app crashes, features that don't work as expected, system wide outage caused by preventable issues, unnecessary notifications, background processes, or tools left running that distract or slow down those systems. A tool that only works correctly if used in a specific way, not intuitive way. So the question that we need to ask is can we create a simple daily stand up or checklist for our digital tools? Can we simplify a complex tool into a template or preconfigured settings? Can we establish minor issues reporting channels to catch small problems before they become a major breakdown? Let's move to process and workflow layout. A poorly designed process creates its own obstacle. The sequence of your work matters. A logical streamline process allows for smooth and fast completion. A convoluted one creates MUDa either in the form of waiting or excessive processing imbalance MUA and leading to an work in progress WIP pile up and delay inventory waste. If we mapped our process from start to finish, where would we find detours, bottlenecks, dead ends or unnecessary steps? Streamlining the flow of value, common ways to look for. A single person or step that slows down the entire workflow is an example of a bottleneck. The time it takes to gather all the necessary information before starting a task is a long setup time. Wasted time finding the right document tools or person for the next step. It is the searching time, unnecessary compliance steps, redundant approvals or excessive documentation for simple task is extra wrapping and unwrapping or overprocessing waste. The question to ask for guys and ideas is can we remove this approval step for low risk items? Can the information gathering and the first step be done in the same system? Let's move to the next one, quality control. Quality isn't inspected at the end. It is built from the start. The most expensive mistake is the one you may have to fix. Effective quality control focuses on fool proofing or Poka Yoki the process to prevent defects from ever occurring. This directly attacks the Moda for rework and correction. Where do errors most frequently occur? And how can we make it impossible or at least very difficult that the error will happen again? It's a very beautiful diagram. Designing processes that prevents defects. The common ways to look for is errors in data entry, incorrect information given to the customer or bugs in the code. Reopening tickets, recontacting customers for clarification and re running the reports is an example of rework. Inspection time, excessive time spent on manual quality assurance checks, peer reviews, and supervisor approvals. Errors created by manually copy pasting or moving data between the system is handling induced defects. Ties and ideas and questions to ask. Can we use drop down menus instead of free text fields? Can we add automatic data validation? Can we create standardized templates for common responses to ensure consistency and accuracy? The next item is work item utilization. Every ticket is a raw material. It is designed for efficient processing. The design is your material. The tickets, the forms, the request you work on dramatically impacts the efficiency. Unnecessary fields and confusing layouts or missing information are equivalent for poor quality raw material that leads to scrap and rework. The key question over here is, how can we improve our intake process so that every work item arrives perfectly formed and ready for immediate value added work? How can we reduce waste before the work even begins? Common waste to look for is too many fields in a form leading to confusion and incomplete data, Mints equivalent to an excessive part in a manufacturing setup. Requiring a senior employees time for a simple task that would be automated or handled by a template, like an expensive material because an associated versus a senior employees time is definitely a difference in the dollar value. Tickets that are immediately closed due to missing information and are routed incorrectly or abandoned is an example of scrap in a digital environment. A complex work item that requires significant manual efforts to move through the system, it's same like heavyweight lifting. The key question to ask for Keys and idea is that can we reduce the number of fields in our most common forms? Can we use conditional logics to only show relevant fields? We create different forms for different request type. Moving to the next important part of workplace safety because a safe workplace is an efficient workplace. It reduces the mental stress and makes your employees happy. In a service environment, safety hazards are often invisible but just as damaging. They range from physical strain of poor ergonomics to the digital threats of phishing and mental stress of an unreliable system. A safe environment prevents the ultimate waste which harms your team what are the sources of physical, digital and psychological risk on our daily work? How can we systematically reduce them? Identifying and mitigating the hidden risk. Common hazards to look for is repetitive strain injury, that is RSI, from constant repetitive mouse and keyboard actions. Danger of rotating parts. Phishing males are insecure tools and social engineering risk. Data loss from system crashes without autosave, accidental deletion of critical files, danger of falling objects in a manufacturing setup. If you think about collision on a manufacturing floor, it is similar to overwriting each other's work in a shared document without version control. Danger of high temperature in a manufacturing floor is equivalent to a mental burnout from excessive alerts, constant context switching and high pressure workflows. The key question to ask for guys and ideas is can we introduce keyboard shortcuts to reduce mouse mileage? Can we create simple visual guides for identifying suspicious emails? Can we enable autosave or version history on critical documents? Can we establish focus time rules to reduce notification driven burnouts? You don't need a committee. You don't need a budget. Eisen starts with questioning the status quo. It is a simple brief that a better way is always possible. The greatest barrier isn't resources. It's assuming things can't be changed. Start tomorrow. Pick one small point of friction in your daily work. Ask, is there a better, simpler and a past way to do this? This is the beginning of Kison. 38. Muda Mura Muri: First, let's name the problem you see every day as Muda, the Japanese term for any activity that add cost or time but does not add value. Think of all the frustrating tasks that you do that don't help the customer or the business. That is Muda or waste. It's the most obvious sign that a process isn't working as well as it could. It's the operational equivalent of a leaking pipe, a constant visible train of your resources, time and energy. By definition, Muda means any operational activity that adds cost or time but does not add value to the product or service. Muda directly harms your performance and your customer's experience. Waste isn't just about inefficiency. It's about real world consequences that ripple through the entire organization. It's the root of missed deadlines, budget overruns and dissatisfied customers. Every moment spent on a wasteful activity is the moment not spent on creating value. Increased cost. Reworking claims and managing long queues require extra staff hours and resources. Delayed deliveries, waiting and unnecessary process steps extends the time it takes to serve a customer. Lowered quality. Rust work or process with built in defects lead to errors that require correction. Reduced morale. Constantly dealing with broken processes is frustrating and demotivating for everyone involved. You can see Muda in the queue and in the rework. Waste isn't a theoretical concept. It's happening right now in your daily work. Here's what you look for in a service environment. Waiting in the queue is a type of waste. The customer call waiting for an agent, an insurance claim sitting in the inbox for days, the request waiting for approval from another department. This is a time where no value is being added. The process is tall and the customer is waiting and the clock is ticking. Rework on claims, the waste of defects, a claim form submitted with missing information that needs to be sent back, a data entry error that requires supervisor to correct it. A report that has been rewritten because the initial instructions were unclear. Every minute spent in fixing a mistake is a direct cost. Rework requires extra manpower. Whatever you are paying for a rework, that is waste of resources. Ask yourself, what can we attack in this waste? Identify the waste is the first step. The next is to challenge it. Use this simple but powerful framework to generate ideas for improvement in your own work area. Think about a frustration, non value added task you performed regularly and ask these questions. Eliminate. Can we get rid of this step completely? Why do we do it at all? See, combine. Can we merge this step with another to make it more efficient? Or reduce. If we can't eliminate it, can we reduce the time, cost, or effort that it requires Simplify. Can we make the operation easier, faster or more straightforward? Start questioning the current practices. Think how to do it, not why it cannot be done. So where does all these waste come from? Let's meet Mr. Mura, the Japanese term for inconsistency and imbalance and variation. If Muda is overflowing sink, Mura is the faulty facet, sometimes a trickle, sometimes a flood. Mura is the unewnness in your workflow. It's why one day your team is overwhelmed with request and the next they are waiting for work to arrive. This variation makes your process unpredictable and unstable. Mura means inconsistency or imbalance. It can be due to variation in the capacity or variation in the quantity. Inconsistency is the engine that generates the waste. Mura is rarely visible on its own, but its effect is everywhere. When the work arrives in unpredictable peaks and valleys, it creates a chaotic environment where waste thrives. So rushed work results in errors, bottlenecks and cues. When the work floods in piles up, creating mood of waiting and bottlenecks. When the work ties up, people and systems are left waiting nothing to do the ideal time. To catch up after the flood of work, people rush leading to mistake and the Muda of rework. Pura generates Muda of waiting, Muda of stop, and Muda of transport. Can you see Mura in the uneven workload across your team? Think about the flow of work in your organization. Is it smooth, steady river or does it come in waves that crash against some teams while others are left dry? That imbalance is Mura in action. Team A is the flood buried in request, working late to catch up, high chance of errors due to the pressure. Team B is the trot, waiting for the work from Team A, capacity is wasted, skills are underutilized. This imbalance isn't a problem of individual performance. It's a system problem. This variation is what creates both the cues before the overload team and the ideal team after it. Ask yourself, where is the variation in our process? To smooth out the flow, you first have to see the peaks and the valleys. Look for patterns of inconsistency in your daily, weekly, and even monthly work. Answering these questions reveal hidden Mura. I reduce the variation? Look at the number of task arriving each hour. Is it stable or widely unpredictable? Why does one team member have a backlog while the other is asking for work? Is it due to the skill set difference, task type, or how work is assigned? Does the month end and quarter end creates a predictable surge of work? How does that surge impact our ability to deliver quality service? Start tracking the flow. A simple chart showing task per day can make Mura visible instantly. Finally, look at the root cause of all of it, the Muri, Japanese term of overburden reasonableness or the strain. Muri is putting too much strain on our people, on our systems. It's asking someone to do a task without proper training using confusing softwares or working under constantable pressure. This overburden is what makes the system create inconsistency that is Mura and results in waste or the Muda. Muri means strain. It can be man, machine, or infrastructure overburden. Muri leads to a generation of fatigue. Over burden doesn't just create waste. It burns out our best people. Muri is the most damaging of three Ms because it directly impacts the health and the well being of our team. A system under constant strain is unsustainable. People became, disengaged and eventually leave. Fatigue and burnout. Constant pressure and overtime leads to mental and physical exhaustion. A tired or stressed employee is far more likely to make mistakes creating rework. As strain is one of the reasons for high absentism. Pushing people beyond their capacity results in diminishing returns. Efficiency and quality both suffer. You can feel Muri in the fatigue and see it in the overtime report. Muri isn't just a feeling of being busy. It's a state of being pushed beyond reasonable limits. It manifests when the demand for the job exceeds the capacity of the person or the process designed to handle it. So we have Muri, which is overburdened. We ask employees to handle twice the normal claim volume without extra support, which in turn results into Mura or inconsistency. Employees process some claims quickly but poorly, while others are simply pushed into the next day, creating a volatile and inconsistent workflow, which in turn results into Muda or waste. A poorly process claim comes back as rework, and the delayed claims creates a cube. The original Muri has now created two distinct form of Muda. This cycle shows how the stress we feel is a direct cause of the problem that our customer face. Ask yourself, where is the strain in our system? The final question connects everything together. By looking at the source of overburden or strain, you can address the root cause of nearly all the waste in our organization. Challenge the status quo and look for the pressure points. Can I reduce the strain in the operation? Is there a better, easier, and a more ergonomic way to do this task? Are our tools and systems helping or are their source of frustration and extra work? Are expectations clear and realistic are our people constantly forced into heroic effect to meet unreasonable demand? The concluding thought is that seeing your work through the lens of Muda, Mura, and Muri transforms your perspective. You no longer see problems. You see an interconnected system, and once you see the system, you begin to improve it. 39. Service Excellence Through Process Improvement: When price is your only weapon, you bleed margins. To win low cost bids, management is forced to freeze hiring and demand more output from the same team because the client is giving the price pressure and there is a rising operational cost, and you are stuck in between. The hidden cost isn't efficiency. It's a direct path to breach service level agreements, mounting backlogs and client dissatisfaction. Declining quality leads to cost contract, creating even more pressure to cut cost in the next bid. It's the cycle that erodes profitability and trust. Ifting the battleground from prices to process. Tyson is building block for all lean methodologies using existing technology, processes, and the systems in the best possible way. Kison insight is your most powerful competitive advantage. It isn't your price. It's your unique, highly efficient way of getting the work done. The goal is to move from being a low cost vendor to a strategic partner whose operational excellence is indispensible to the client's success. Outcome, clients stay not because you are the cheapest, but because your ability to reduce their claim rejection or resolve escalations faster is the value. They can't get elsewhere. The success is to reduce the rework cost or give them first time right. Your biggest expense isn't the profit and loss account. It's your process. In Japan, this waste is called Es Moda, operations and activities that add cost and time but do not add value. The visible cost is like salaries, software licenses, and the facilities on your budget report. Invisible hidden factories is a significant portion of your team's day is spent in activities that add zero value to the client. This is where the profits disappear. Correcting rejected claims, searching for information across three systems, re keying data from PDFs, dealing with escalations caused by process failures. So rework, delay, escalation, and searching are all hidden costs in our service process. The seven waste or Muda that are hiding from the plain sight, rework, that is inferior quality work, which gets rejected and we need to do it again. Waiting waste, motion waste. Here, people are not moving, but you are clicking mouse, pressing all tab to change between the screen. Transportation waste doesn't mean physical movement of things in a transportation waste doesn't mean physical movement of things in a service setup. In a service setup. It could be about moving files between folders, over processing waste, typing the same thing again and again by manual re entry, or you are going for different approvals when you know that that application is a low risk type of application. Inventory backlog is also a waste. Overproduction, making more than required is also a waste. The eighth waste is the skill set waste, not utilizing your resources to the best possible extent. The goal isn't to work harder. It's to remove the obstacle. For waste, apply the ECR technique, eliminate, combine, reduce and simplify. We need to hire more people to clear this backlog is not the correct way. We need to change the sentence as we cleared the backlog by eliminating three unnecessary approval steps from our process. The result is cost per transaction drops significantly. You increase operational capacity and profitability using your existing team and technology. 30% increase in throughput with zero capital investment. Every error a client catches is a defect we ship. We have to improve quality thus reducing the cost of rework. We often accept a certain error rate. Example, 5% claim rejection as the cost of doing the business. The reality is each error triggers a cascade of cost activity. Client escalation, diagnostic time, rework by a senior team member and a delayed revenue. The outcome could be a cost of poor quality COP Ques, silently erodes your margins and more importantly, your client's trust in your capability. We have a damaged CSAT score, client escalation, rework by senior agents, delayed payments and compliance risk. These are all the side effects of an incorrect data entry. The flaw of inspecting quality in instead of building it in. A traditional response is that when the traditional response is when error rates are rising, our first instinct is to add more layers of quality assurance checks at the end of the process. The fundamental flaw over here is that the strategy of detection, not prevention, we are paying people to find mistakes that we paid others to make in the first place, very beautiful sentence. This is a vicious cycle. It's expensive, and it slows down the entire process. It doesn't stop the error from occurring again tomorrow. Make it easy to do it right and hard to do it wrong. The key principle of Poka yoke are mistake proofing or fool proofing is to build quality of doing it right, easier, and doing it wrong, difficult. This is a mindset shift. Move from blaming individuals for errors to explaining or examining the process that allowed the error to happen. This approach is very important because instead of asking people to be more careful, we design systems where the right way is the easiest way. The outcome is first time right. This becomes the standard, not the exception. Rework, lumpet, client satisfaction, source, and compliance is strengthened. In a digital world, waiting is a four letter word. We need to improve delivery of products and thus reduce the lead time. Reduction of the lead time allows us to have fewer inventory. Clients and customers expect near instantaneous service, but our internal processes are often clogged with queues, handoffs and approval gates. The symptom, this leads directly to the breach turnaround time, service level agreement commitments. The consequences mounting backlog, creating stress while frustrated clients begin looking for faster, more reliable alternatives. In the digital word, weight is a four letter word. The anatomy of a ten day turnaround for 45 minutes of work. When we map a service process, we discovered that the actual touch time when an employee is actively working on a task is a tiny fraction of the total lead time. This we identify during the analyze phase. The example is that a new account opening may require only 45 minutes of total active working time, but it takes ten business days from start to finish. The waste over here is that the other nine days, 23 hours are a pure waste of waiting. It's the time the task spent sitting in the inbox, waiting in the system queues or being handed off between the teams. Creating a river of value, not a series of stagnant pawns eliminate bottlenecks and handoffs to create a smooth, continuous flow of work. A customer ticket is passed from level one support to a level two support in the billing team, waiting in a queue at each step. So before Kison, we have waiting ways between Team A, Team B, and Team C. After Kison, we have a continuous flow of work. The process is redesigned and the agents are cross trained so that the level one agent can resolve 80% of the issues in the first call. The result is that SLAs are not just met, they are exceeded. Blogs disappear, and your operational gains and reputational gains are speed and reliability. The human cost of a broken process, this strain is called as Muri, strain on the man, machine or infrastructure. Muri is one of the reasons for high absentism in a service sector. In a service operation, safety isn't about physical hazard. It's about psychological strain of fighting a broken system every day. The Muri will overload our best people with unreasonable workloads, clerky systems, and constant pressure to meet targets with inadequate tools. This leads directly to strain, frustration, disengagement, and ultimate burnout. Good people don't leave bad jobs. They leave bad processes. Talented employees get rid of reporting the same road blocks every day seeing nothing changed. They leave taking invaluable tribal knowledge with them. This creates a cycle of constant hiring and retraining. High iteration is a massive hidden expense in a recruitment fees, training hours and lost productivity, and it devastates the morale of those who remain. This is a virtuous cycle. Better work creates better businesses. In your organization, employees are not coming with two hands and two legs. They are coming with one brain. You should utilize that brain to make your process excellent with higher quality output and speed, which in turn creates royal clients and loyal clients with higher retention and profit. We need to empower employees and reduce the attrition rate. 40. Service Kaizen Ideas: Generating Kaizen ideas for service workflows, change for the better, one small idea at a time. Tyson is not a complex methodology reserved for engineers. It's a mindset. It's about learning to see the work that is actually being done and empowering the people who do it to make it better. The first step is process analysis, seeing the real workflow. Your official process map is a hypothesis. The reality is the truth. Let's assume that you have an SOP. The reality is that it might not go straight, but there might be multiple communication, multiple jumping between the processes. We begin by observing the actual path that work takes, not the one that is documented in the SOP. People doing the work are the primary source of truth. Study the current process and operations at a micro level. The person doing that process can be great help because he brings the practical aspects into that study. Our focus is the client on boarding journey. Let's apply our thinking on a common service process. A new client is signed. The goal is to get them set up our systems and ready for service delivery. On the surface, it seems a straightforward process. Sales hand off a signed contract to the operation team. The operation enters the client data into the CRM. A case is created for the legal team to review the terms. A manager provides the final approval, the account is activated, and a welcome email is sent. What really happens between these boxes? The goal of analysis is not judgment, but understanding. Where does information or responsibility transfer from one person or team to another? Sales to ops or ops to legal. Identify the tools, what software, documents, or systems are used at each step. Is it Email, PDF, contract, CRM, internal messaging. Track the communication. How do people communicate? Where do the questions get asked and answered? Email threats, chat messages, and meetings. To answer these questions, we can't stay at 30,000 feet. We need to go to the ground level. The second step is micro level study. Magnify the moments of work. Kaizen and ideas are found in the details, the clicks, the weights, the copy paste, and the clarifying questions. Shadowing, observe a team member performing the process from start to finish. Interviewing, ask open ended questions. Can you walk me through how you do this? What's the most frustrating part of this task? What takes longer than it should? Self reporting. Ask the team members to lock their steps and spend for a specific task. The onboarding journey. What we see when we look closer observation notes from the operations team. The finding one is that there is a duplicate data entry. The sales team notes are there in their own system. The operation team manually re types the client's name, address, contact information, service level from the PDF contract into the CRM. This takes on an average 15 minutes and sometimes leads to typos. The finding two, the queue analysis. Legal cases enter into a single shared inbox. The average time a case sits in this queue before being opened is 48 hours. There is no visibility into which case is most urgent. The onboarding journey. Following the approval trial, observation notes from the approval steps. The manager's approval is the final gate, but the manager is often in the meetings. The batch process approval twice a day. If there was a question, they send a chat message back to the operations person, which takes the case back to the queue and creates a back and forth conversation. The average delay here is 1.5 business days. Where is the original contract? I'm checking. Attach the PDF. Can you confirm the service tire? Again, there is a conversation that goes on. We now have a map to the real process. The gap between the SOP and the reality is where we find the opportunities. These gaps, the delays, the rework, and the frustrations are not failure of people. They are symptoms of process waste. Waste means operations and activities that add cost or time but do not add value to the product or service. To generate effective ideas, we first need a language to describe this waste, and let's learn through the help of three M. If you look at this picture, the sales notes, there's a manual re entry. And goes into the CRM entry form. There's a 48 hours queue waiting time. The queue is then picked up by the legal team for the review, and there's a lot of back and forth that happens between the legal review team and the operations person, waiting for the manager's approval, which is an applied step, but there is an approval bottck at this step again. We can clearly see what's happening in the actual process flow. Identifying the waste, the language of three M. Japanese manufacturing philosophy gave us three lenses to view the process problem. Muda, waste, Mura, unevenness, Muri, overburden. Any activity that consumes resources but creates no value for the client, the most obvious enemy is a Muda. Inconsistency in your process that creates peaks and valleys. Think of widely unpredictable workload or quality level. Muri, overburden. Putting excessive strain on your PPR system leads to burnout errors and downtime. Finding Muda or waste in the onboarding process. Muda is the work we do that the client would not want to pay for. It is the most common target for Kison. The sales note goes into manual entry, Muda for excessive processing, CRM entry, waiting time, legal team is waiting waste is available over there, waiting for movement and waiting waste for manager approval between the Ops team and the legal team. So let's understand each of them in detail. The back and forth chat messages for information, clarifying information that should have been done in the initial handoff, defect or rework, correcting typos made during the duplicate data entry. Excess processing, the act of manually re keying the information that already exists in a digital format. Finding Mura or unevenness and Muri overburden your process is equally important. Muda is often a symptom of a deeper issue. Mura and Muri are frequently the root cause of this problem. Mura or unevenness, the manager approving a batch creates a Mura. The workflow isn't smooth. It's a stop and go. Some days 20 approvals are processed, other days zero, creating a backlog, waiting waste Muri, overburdened expecting one person in the Ops team to be an expert at manually interpreting every unique sales contract creates Muri. This cognitive strain leads to errors, Muda, or defects, and frustration. Mura generates Muda of waiting. Muri leads to generation of fatigue, so it reduces the productivity of a man. Very beautifully said. We have named a problem. Now we have to solve them. The observation is duplicate data entry. The waste type is Muda, excessive processing and Muri cognitive load. Legal que, weighting waste, and batch processing of Mura, manager approval delay, weighting waste, Muda, and uneven flow Mura. The Kaizens philosophy tells us that generating idea reverses the waste. Let's use a simple most powerful framework to do that. ECRS thinking, a framework of ideas leading of asking, how can we do this wasteful step faster? ECRS process forces us to ask better questions. E eliminate, can we get rid of this step entirely, the best possible outcome? C, combine. If we don't eliminate it or if we can't eliminate it, can we combine it with another step to reduce the handoff? Or reduce or rearrange. If we can't combine it, can we reduce the time, effort, or resources it takes or change its sequence? S, simplify if all else fails, how can we make this step foolproof, easier and less prone to error? Applying ECRS starting with eliminate and combined, we have duplicate data entry. The idea is to eliminate it. Can we integrate the sale system with the CRM system so that when deals are marked closed and won, a client record is automatically created. This eliminates the manual entry steps entirely. Before the sales team, there was a manual entry into the CRM. The manual work generated waste and errors. After this, we did an API integration between the sales system and the CRM. Automatic integration removes that step. So we eliminated it. Now let's go to the next one, legal and managerial handoffs. The idea here is to combine. Can we combine the legal review and managerial approval steps? Create a single review and approve stage where both parties are notified simultaneously for standard contract. Perhaps the manager approval isn't needed at all, eliminate. So before a legal review would be completed, handed off and weighted in the sequential steps to create delay and waiting for the manager approval. After CISN, we are saying there's a parallel review and approval process by the legal team and the manager. This parallel processing speeds up the workflow, and we get an approved contract. Let's continue with RNS that is reduce and simplify the legal queue time. The idea here is to reduce or rearrange. If we can't eliminate the queue, can we reduce the waiting time, create a priority system like tagging the cases as high, medium and low priority so that the legal team works on the most critical item first. This rearranges the work. Approval delays or information hunt. The idea here is to simplify. To prevent back and forth question, can we simplify the handoff? Create a standardized digital handoff forms with required fields. The form cannot be submitted unless all the necessary information and documents are attached, like the client name, contract PDF, and the service tire. Foolproof the form ensure that the complete information was handed off. The new improved onboarding journey. By applying ECRS, we haven't just tweaked the whole process. We designed a new more effective one. Before Kaizen, the sales contract was one, manual data re entry into the CRM system, hand off and waiting time for the legal review. The que waiting time was somewhere around 48 hours. After the legal team reviewed, it went to the manager approval where it would be a 1.5 days approval delay. And there will be a lot of back and forth between the legal review team and the managerial approval and then the onboarding gets completed. The average cycle time is five to seven working days. After the KISN ECRS application, the sales is one. There's an automated data sink, standardized handoff, parallel review approval between legal and managerial approval, and the onboarding is completed. The projected cycle time is one to two business days. Many of these powerful ideas don't require a massive budget. Kison thrives on clever, low investment solutions. The fifth step, focus on low investment, high impact ideas. Don't focus on spending money, focus on your wisdom, wisdom and small changes versus heavy investment. The best Kaizen and ideas are often simple, clever changes that uses existing tools and the expertise of the system. The goal is to get a quick win that builds moments. The implemented idea, which is easy to implement and requires least zero investment. Whatever investment we are doing, it's break even should be recovered within a year. Prioritizing our onboarding ideas. Not all ideas can be implemented tomorrow. Let's categorize them based on the effort impact metrics. On the X axis, I have effort, low on the left side and high on the right side. On the Y axis, I have impact, low below and high above. So I start with the cake wins which are low effort and high impact. So that becomes my focus area. Like, create a standardized digital handoff forms, implement priority tagging systems for the legal inbox. We then go for major projects where we plan for this where the impact is high and the effort is also high, like integrating sales and O CRM system. High effort and low impact, we will reconsider it later. Build a customer approval dashboard from scratch. Low impact and low effort will be our third priority that is create a shared FAQ for common client questions. Tyson is a culture, not a project. Small improvements when implemented continuously by everyone, creates a massive change. We identify the ways we generate ideas, implement them, standardize and observe again. What to do a leader's role. The question everything, constantly ask, why do we do it this way? Seek many ideas. 10% suggestions from ten people are always better than one person's 100% idea. Think how to and not, why not? Focus on making the idea work, not on listing the obstacles. Implement then perfect. Don't wait for a perfect solution. Implement a good idea now and improve it later. Put on your Kaizen and glasses. The most powerful tool for improvement is not a new piece of software or a bigger budget. It's a new perspective. Your work is full of opportunities for small, brilliant changes. You just have to learn how to see them. What process will you look at tomorrow? 41. Check our Understanding: So let's get with the exercise on the next slide. Let's do a rapid file. Lien management use resources as an investment to create customer value while traditional management sees resources privately as cost. Yes, it's true. Traditional management encourages continuous improvement even if a process is already working efficiently. The answer is false. Len follows a pull production system while traditional management follows a push system based on sales forecast. True. Traditional management structure encourages a flat hierarchy while a quick decision making falls. Lian standardization means everyone follows the same process until better is discovered. True. Which of the following is the key focus area of lien management? Increasing output at all cost, reducing expense through isolated optimization, maximizing customer value and eliminating waste, relying on static processes without adjustment. Yes, you're right. Maximizing customer value and eliminating waste. An healthcare provider follows a traditional approach for patient scheduling, booking appointments month in advance without considering the real time demand. This leads to long wait time and inefficiencies. How can in help in this scenario? Implement a more flexible scheduling system that adjust based on real time demand, increase the number of appointments slot without process improvement. Continue scheduling patients far in advance without considering the availability. Reduce the available slots to limit patient load. You're right. Implement a more flexible scheduling system that adjust based on real time demand. Let's go to the next question. An insurance company resists process improvement because leadership believes current methods work well enough. Employees identify inefficiencies but do not feel empowered to speak up. How would a lean culture address this? Encourage continuous improvement by allowing employees to suggest changes, maintain existing process as long as they function. Only make changes when the customer files a complaint, centralize all decisions at the top level management. You're right. Increase continuous improvement by allowing employees to suggest changes. 42. Value Stream mapping Visualization: Getting started with Value Stream Mapping, VSM, as we call it, it's a very powerful tool for visualizing and improving the entire business process from start to finish. As you can see in the picture, why should I use VSM? Focusing on one process is like fixing the car's engine but leaving the tire flat. To see the big picture and make the real difference is where VSM plays a role. It's a collaborative tool with clear benefits. Visualization is both material and information flow and focus on impactful changes. How do we create VSM? Step number one is to choose a high impact process, start where a customer is unhappy or product that generates significant income. So either you have an SKU 1234, which is a low priority of $10,000, or you have a half million SKU, which is a high priority. So pick that up. Annual income of SKU 1234 is 10,000, which is low, whereas SKU 5678 is $500,000. Second step is to map the current state by walking the floor, use pencil and paper and start from end of the process and observe the reality. The goal is understanding and not just drawing. Talk to people who genuinely understand how the material and information is actually flowing. 43. Mapping the Hidden Factory: Are our improvements making real difference? We invest time and resources optimizing individual processes, expecting big results. Yet overall performance often stagnates and the customer feels no difference. Why? Because focusing on one part of the system is like improving the car's engine but leaving the fields deflated. To truly improve, you must see optimize the entire flow of value. Every organization has hidden factory. The work you see versus the work that happens on the floor. Alongside our productive work, there are hidden systems or waste operating every day. There are unseen waiting time, unnecessary handoffs, rework loops, information bottlenecks. We can't fix what we can't see. The first step is to make these hidden factories visible to everyone. Value Stream Mapping is a blueprint for our Hidden Factory. VSM is a tool we use to see the entire system. This is not theoretical exercise done on the computer. It's a hands on process. Walk the actual path of the work from customer request to delivery. Use pencil and paper to map what you really see. Talk to the people who do the work to understand it. It creates one version of truth for everyone. The benefit is it's a common language. VSM breaks down the complex process into simple visual formats that everyone from the C suit to the shop floor can understand. Cross functional alignment, it brings different teams into the same room to map the same process. This replaces departmental assumptions with shared fact based reality. It pinpoints where implementation really matters. The focus is on value. Not all processes create equal value. VSM helps you to start where the impact is the greatest. Where is the customer most unhappy? Which product or service generates the most significant income? VSM prevents wasting efforts on low impact improvements and direct resources on what will move the needle. It shows how work and information actually flows. It gives you a complete picture. Most improvement methods only look at the physical steps. VSM is unique because it maps two critical flow simultaneously, the material flow and the information flow. How the product or the service moves towards the customer is called as a material flow. How instructions, orders, and schedules tell the material where to go. Often the biggest delays are hidden in the information flow. The difference is clarity before and after VSM. Our process knowledge is fragmented based on assumptions and full of blind spots, we argue about the problem. After the shared reality, you get to know the cycle time, the wait time, the up time for each of the step, and we get to know the total lead time versus the total processing time. We have a single data driven view of the entire system. We see the real problem and can agree on solutions. The map is not the goal. Understanding the process is the goal. VSM is a living document, not a final report to be filled away. Its true purpose is to create a moment of genuine collective understanding of the process. Its shared understanding is the foundation for effective sustainable improvements. The next step is not to admire the map, but to build a future state. 44. The Analog Advantage: The analog advantage. Mastering the Value Stream Mapping before the software. What is the best software for Value Stream Mapping? This is the most common question we hear, but the most powerful VSM tool isn't a program you install. It's a structured conversion between the people who do the work, and the goal isn't just to map the process, but to create a shared understanding. Software has its place, but only after the foundational VSM work is done with the team. The principle one is to walk the process, go and see it. What you do, physically follow the path of a single work item from beginning to end. Observe every action, every handoff, every delay without adjustment. There is a single patient service request from the initial phone call to the data entry, specialist review to final resolution and communication. Why it comes first Because a process map drawn in a conference room is a hypothesis. A process map you walked in is a fact. You simply cannot walk the process from behind the desk with the software. You uncover the hidden factory, the undocumented workarounds, the system delays, and the communication gap that never appear in the official procedure, document, but are the true sources of the waste. The principle tool is to use the paper and pencil toe. As a team map the process in real time on large physical surface, use sticky notes for process steps, markers for connection, and capture data points and pain points directly on the map. Using the whiteboard, map the claim intake walk through with each sticky note representing the step like scan the document, enter the data, initial validation, and route the edge. Why it comes first Because it's a democratic low barrier tool. Anyone can use a sticky node which encourages universal participation. It keeps the focus on the process conversion, not on who knows how to use the software. What it enables a shared visual artifact that the entire team builds together. The map becomes a physical focal point for discussion, debate, and alignment. It fluids and easy to change, encouraging experimentation and iteration. Principle three, empower the cross functional team, assemble a dedicated team of five to seven people who actually perform and support the work. This must include representatives from every significant handoffs in the process. Your role is to facilitate not to be the expert. A team for a case handoff process should include people from sending department, receiving department, and a supervisor or a lead who sees the big picture. People who live in the process knows the process the best. A MP's value comes from integrating the different, often conflicting perspective to those on the front line into a single shared reality. This approach breaks down functional silos. When the claim processor understands the billing specialist challenges firsthand, they build empathy and collective ownership for improving the entire value stream, not just their individual steps. Why the manual approach is non negotiable. Jumping to software is tempting, but it skips the most critical work. The initial VSM session is not about creating a perfect document. It's about building a deep collective understanding. People must precede platforms, and the insight must come from human interactions and discoveries. Alignments must precede analysis. Team must first agree on the current reality before they effectively analyze or improve it. Understanding must precede documentation. The goal is a shared mental model, not just a polished diagram. When to use the software. Once you have created a clean, synthetic format for sharing with the leadership, analyze the future state opportunities with smaller teams, perform complex lead time calculation across multiple scenarios. 45. Value Stream Mapping Beginner's Guide: A bigness guide for Value Stream Mapping. Why use VSM? Don't just improve the engine. Improving a single process is like upgrading the car's engine, but leaving the wheels deflated and the overall performance doesn't improve. See the whole system, not just one piece, focusing only on one process won't be felt by the customer. VSM helps you improve the entire value stream. The core benefits of VSM, a collaborative tool. VSM creates a visual map that can be easily understood by everybody involved in the process. Focus on what counts. It helps you see and analyze both the flow of material and the flow of information. Where to begin your map. Start where you can get the results immediately. Don't try to map the entire company at once. Pick a specific area for maximum impact. You have two SKUs, SKA or SKUB. Pick up the one where the flow of money is there. If one SKU generates $10,000 annual income, and the other generates 500,000, start to map the second one. Target the two key areas. Start where the customer is unhappy or with the product or generate significant income for the company. Five golden rules for mapping. Map by walking with pencil and paper. This is not a computer exercise. Walk the shop floor and draw the map yourself as you observe. Start mapping from the end. Begin from the end of the stream and work backwards. This helps you better understand the process from the customer's perspective. Look for reality, not system data. Do not rely on data in the systems. Speak directly with the people who do the work and understand what really is happening. The goal is understanding and not the map. The purpose of the exercise is to genuinely understand the flow of material and information, not just to produce a diagram. The current state can be messy. Our target is to go to a future state map. So to reach the future state map, we must first draw the current state. Map what is actually happening now. Avoid the temptation to jump to conclusion and design the future state immediately. 46. VSM Mapping the Entire Flow: The illusion of improvement. Improving one process is like tuning the car's engine while the tires are flat. Your teams work hard, but does the customer feel the difference? The result is lot of effort with no real change in the overall performance. The result is lot of efforts with no real change in the overall performance. From a single point to the entire system, value isn't created in one step. It is delivered by the entire system. This end to end journey from request to delivery is value stream mapping. To improve the system, you must first be able to see the system. VSM is your X ray for the flow. The production control is sending a request which goes and triggers parts, welding, assembly line, pain, and a happy customer. So VSM is not just a diagram. It's a diagnostic tool for your business. It visualizes both the work and the instruction, the material flow, and the information flow. It reveals the real bottleneck and delays hiding between the steps. Your flow defines the entire experience. Customer feels the speed of the entire system, not the efficiency of one silo. A smoother, faster internal flow directly translates to a better customer experience. Your total lead time is the only metric the customer truly feels. Locally optimized system will take 30 days for the customer delivery. Flow optimized system can deliver the product to the customer in 12 days. Start where it counts. It could either be a customer pinpoint or a high value product. There is no point in trying to map the entire company at once. Start where you can get the results quite immediately. Two ideal starting points is where the customer is unhappy on product that generates significant income. True improvement is system wide. So avoid local optimization over the system flow. Optimizing one part of the system will not optimize the whole system. Focus on connections and handoffs, not just the individual steps. Shift your thinking from how I can improve my process to how we can improve the flow. 47. VSM Preparation Building the Blueprint: Mastering VSM Phase one, building the blueprint for a successful workshop. The Value Stream Mapping journey unfolds in three phases. The successful Value Stream Mapping initiative is a comprehensive process, not just a single workshop. It is divided into three distinct phases. The phase one is the preparation, which is our focus for this class. This is the foundational work done four to six weeks before the event. This includes defining the scope, building the teams, and gathering the data. Phase two is the workshop, the intensive collaborative event, which is a two to five days workshop, where the team maps the current state map and the future state map and builds the implementation plan. Phase three is the follow up, the execution phase. It takes six to 12 months where the team implements the plan, monitors the KPI, and delivers value to the customer. Step one is defining the score with precision four to six weeks before the workshop. We need to identify the customer who is the ultimate recipient of the value in this process, the patient, the insurance member, or the healthcare provider submitting the claim. Select a service family. Choose one specific service to map. Avoid mapping everything at once. Example, you can take prior authorization for speciality drugs and not all prior authorization. We need to set the start and the end point because defining the precision trigger that starts the process and the final action that concludes it is very important. Prior authorization request received via Portal, final decision communicated to the provider. Step two, assemble the cross functional team. It could be your claims intake team, your contact center, IT and systems, billing revenue cycle, process experts. Involve all the process steps. The team must include members from each step or every step of the value stream you just defined. Include process experts, involve the people who actually do the work daily, not just supervisors. Their hands on knowledge is invaluable. Team members must be 100% dedicated for the entire duration of the workshop which typically lasts two to five days. This full dedication is to be ensured because no dropping in and out. Clearly defining roles and responsibility of each member during the preparation phase is very important to secure leadership and expert facilitation. Engaging the company's leaders or sponsors is very important because if the leaders are involved from the start, they act like sponsors. They provide resources, remote roadblocks and champion the future state. Appoint an experienced facilitator, this role is essential. The facilitator guides the workshop, manages the timeline, and ensure that the team stays on track and objective. The facilitator must be neutral, not the process owner or someone with a vested interest in specific outcome. Bring in a Sensi if needed. If your organization lacks an expert facilitator, it is highly advisable to contact an external coach or a Sensi to lead this process. We need to gather preliminary data to establish the baseline. That's the step number three. Collect the baseline data from your systems before the workshop. This provides a factual starting point to compare with observations made during the event. KPIs like cycle time, lead time, quality indicator, and maintenance indicator. Processing time for individual task, like average time to manually review a complex claim is a cycle time. Total time, a work item waits between the steps. Time a claim sits in the queue before being opened. First pass yield error rates, rework percentage, and denial rates are examples of quality indicators. For back office, this means system downtime, application latency, or batch processing delays that impact work. Step four, prepare the physical workshop. That environment is very important. You need to book a dedicated space, secure a room with large uninterrupted walls or black boards that can be dedicated to the VSM for the entire workshop. The map must be persistent. The map must not be erased or taken down. It needs to be constantly dedicated to posting and controlling the value stream for as long as needed to implement the future state. Gather all the necessary supplies. Large sheets of paper for the map backbone, markers and posted notes in multiple colors and size, calculators, tapes, and anything else needed for drawing and analysis. Driving the organizational alignment, hold a weekly or bi weekly meeting with the team and leaders during the four to six week preparation time. That is about scheduling the pre workshop check ins. Purpose of the alignment meeting is to verify how the preparation phase is going on. Review the progress of the task, the scope, data collection, and logistics, address any roadblocks or challenges that arise, maintain the momentum. These regular check in reinforces the importance of upcoming workshops and ensure accountability. Your preparation readiness checklist. The scope is defined, customer is identified, specific service family is selected. A clear start and end point is set. Data is gathered, initial cycle time, lead time, key quality indicators, system performance, downtime data, et cetera. The team has to be ready, cross functional team selected, who are committed, leadership sponsor who are engaged and informed. Experienced neutral facilitator is appointed. We need to complete the logistic by dedicating a war room with a large wall secured. All supplies like paper, mark, posted, et cetera, are stocked. Regular alignment meetings are held. 48. Submit your project LSS: Now that we have completed the entire learning, I request you to go down to the project and resource section to ensure that you complete the project. Let's kin share, the project instructions are very clearly given in the project and resource section. Now that you have successfully completed the training on Lean Six Sigma made simple for giving you results, it's important for you to complete the project. The project instructions are given in the project and resource section where we have given you an idea about what type of project you can complete. I'm going to walk you through a demo to give you a basic understanding of how you can submit a project. So applying the Lean Six Sigma basic tools to uncover eliminate small inefficiencies in your daily routine or workplace. Choose your processes. Pick up any daily task or simple work process. Example, morning coffee routine, email or filing documents. I have cleaned up my desk, and I'm going to submit that as my project. You're also free to use CIPOCOFlow charts to submit as your project. The objective is to spot the waste or variation in the process, apply some basic lean principle to identify the inefficiencies. You need to propose a quick fix of how you are making the change or reducing or eliminating the waste. We need to measure the impact before and after metric, or you can show a picture which can show the results. How do you upload? You can upload a single image containing the original process map or the process that you have improved. Please write a description that what exactly have you done. I have also given you Skillshare project template for you to have an idea. I'm going to upload my project by clicking on Submit Project. So it is very clearly showing me the image of before and after. You can submit the image has been uploaded. I'm also free to attach an image over here so that it can clearly show the picture of before versus after. That's all by clicking on publish, I'm ensuring that my project is published and it's visible. This helps me in submitting the project, and my project will be visible over here. Thank you once again for the time that you have taken in investing in yourself. You have completed an important milestone, and I hope you will feel proud of your progress. Remember, Six Sigma isn't just about tools and techniques. It is about thinking differently, solving problems, and feeling better, and it's about leading change wherever you are. So you keep applying what you have learned, submit your class project, and don't hesitate to reach out if you need guidance or want feedback. I will see you in the next class. Up till then, keep learning, keep improving, and most importantly, keep believing in your potential. Thank you. 49. Thank you for being my students: Thank you so much for completing the lean Sig Sigma course with me. In this course, we learned about Tim Wood's different types of waste. I sincerely appreciate the time and effort and the focus that you have given to your learning journey, because continuous improvement starts with people like you who choose to grow. Let me take a quick moment to introduce myself beyond this class. Hi, I'm Dimple Sangui, a corporate trainer, consultant, and the founder of the Adiant Wisdom Solutions or the Avisa Learning App. Over the years, I have the privilege of working with professionals and organizations across various industries. This has given me an opportunity for guiding teams in understanding and implementing Lean Six Sigma, operational excellence, quality management, business process improvement. This learning journey has helped me to equip a lot of organizations to achieve excellence. My goal has always been simple empower individuals with powerful tools and to solve real world problems and building high performing teams, both at business and in personal life. Whether it's through a training, coaching, or consulting, I strive to make lean six sigma approachable, applicable, impactful, and easily understandable. I'm passionate about helping learners at every level from freshers just starting out to senior leaders looking to drive transformation in their organization. And this Skillshare class is just one of the many ways I share this passion. But your journey doesn't end here. I would like to stay connected with you as you grow. You can connect with me on Lindn at Dimple Sang. The description, the link to my Linden has been given in my teacher's profile, and the QR code is displayed on the screen. I regularly post valuable content on Lean Six Sigma, continuous improvement, productivity, and leadership. You will also find updates on my workshop, case studies, and success stories and learning opportunities. I also run a dedicated Whatsapp channel where I share quick learnings, tips, micro lessons, reminders and tools that you use in your everyday work. Link for the WhatsApp channel has been shared in the description below. This channel acts like a pocket size continuous improvement code, and you can join it with a QR code displayed on the screen. If you want to have access to even more learning resources, including the self paced courses, certification program, and learning challenges, I would request you to make sure that you check out the Aviza earning app on the Google Play Store. You can download it from the link given in the description or the QR code displayed on the screen. I constantly keep adding new content to my app, including downloadable resources, templates, quizzes, project ideas, and career tips. So it's a great way to keep your skills even after this course. Thank you very much, once again, stay connected, and it was a pleasure teaching all of you on the Skillshare platform. Continue to invest time yourself in your career growth. You have completed an important milestone, and I'm so proud of your progress. If you like the class, remember to leave a review about your experience and ensure that you submit your project so that you can get the certificate from Skillshare. Think differently, solve problems better and lead for change because you are the leaders. Thank you and see you in the next class.