World of Business: Lean Operations Research Assignment

Lean Operations
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Lean Operations
In today's competitive world of business, every organization is striving to create more value to its customers while employing fewer resources with the aim of optimizing profit. In most cases, this dream is not achieved due to a lot of wastes in the process of transacting the businesses of the organization. These wastes include transportation, motion, inventory and waiting among others. Applying lean principles in the organization can offer a solution to those problems by eliminating the wastes in the process through a collaborative team effort by the members of the organization. Lean philosophy stresses on establishing more value for customers while minimizing the resources used. This is achieved by optimizing the workflow. Optimized workflow results in an organized manner of operations in which the employees are efficiently and effectively accessed to the tools they need to deliver a delightful customer service. The costs are minimized as a result of efficiency in the workflow. With fewer costs and high customer service, an organization will automatically lead towards higher returns regarding profits. However, most organizations have not yet leaned out their processes partly due to lack of knowledge of leaning out and ignorance. As a result, there are more wastes in such organizations which negatively impacts on customer service and satisfaction and reduces the marginal returns in the form of business profit. This paper seeks to help such managers by depicting a distinction between a leaned out process and un-leaned out one through and to show the benefits of leaning a process as well as describing the actual process of leaning out a business organization.
Characteristics of an Organization Full Of Wastes (Not Leaned Out)
An organization that is not leaned can easily be identified from the frequent wastes that occur within the organization. There are numerous characteristics that signify wastes in such organization as was observed in company XYZ (Benn & Griffiths, 2014). The organization does not prioritize customer value. Rather, the employees simply work out their duties to accomplishment without focusing on the quality of the service to the customer. The managers also focus less on creating the customer (Benn & Griffiths, 2014). They, instead, focus on producing more products faster which are of low quality. The customers sometimes reject such products leading to a loss (Karim & Arif-Uz-Zaman, 2013).
Also, there is a disorder, and the tools are highly disorganized. Machines are disorganized, that is, they are not properly placed where they should be. For example, there are only a few printing machines which are used by the employees but apparently are designated in the manager's office (Karim & Arif-Uz-Zaman, 2013). Any time the employees need to print anything will have to look for the machine in the manager's office and thus waste time traveling to locate the machine. There are no designated places where important tools are placed and much of the time is spent by the employees locating such tools. Every employee uses a given apparatus and places it anywhere yet such apparatus are shared among the employees, and ther...