Lean Organizational Structure Lean Leadership Series

Lean Organizational Structure
Lean Leadership Series
Topics
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Work Flow and Work Design
What is a Value Stream?
Organizational Structure
Lean Organizational Structure
Benefits of Lean Organizational Structure
Incentives and Reward Structure
Adapting Structure and Systems
Education and Training
Barriers to Change
Achieving an Extended Lean Enterprise
Sustaining Lean Organizational Structure
Summary
Organizational Structure
Marketing
Maintenance
Product Design
&
Development
Production
Quality Mgmt
Organizational
Silos
Procurement
Finance/
Accounting
These silo units impede efficient communication,
coordination, responsiveness and overall system optimization
Organizational Structure
• Traditional Organizational Structure
▫ Is incompatible with the value stream flow
▫ Its design support long production runs of standardized
parts in batches with long flow times
▫ It does not support one-piece flow and just-in-time (pull)
production
▫ It is structures to minimize machine and worker idle time,
but at the expense of very high inventory levels, long flow
times, cluttered shop floors and high scrap/obsolescence
rates
▫ It is not structured for minimizing response time and
maximizing flexibility
▫ Results in extreme specialization of job functions
Organizational Structure
• Traditional Organizational Structure
▫ Results in a large number of job classifications
▫ It is incompatible with the team approach of Lean
production in which workers perform many tasks and have
few job classifications
Lean Organizational Structure
• Effective structure in Integrated Product/Process Teams
organized as self-managed work teams
▫ A dedicated team for each product family includes
expertise from marketing, engineering design, purchasing,
tooling manufacturing, industrial engineering, quality
assurance, customer relations, suppliers and customers
• Work teams are focused horizontally on a linked set of
activities along the value stream
• Facilitate ongoing efforts to minimize waste via
continuous improvement initiatives
Lean Organizational Structure
• The work teams are in a position to perform many of
the “indirect tasks” associated with managing their
work, including:
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Workspace layout
Quality assurance
Maintenance
Setup change-overs
Rebalancing work loads
Continuous improvement
Benefits of Lean Organizational Structure
• Greatly reduces non-value-adding functions
• Increases efficiency
• Increases flexibility
• Enhances the workers’ value to the Enterprise
• Improved employee engagement and satisfaction
• Harnesses its employees ideas towards continuous
improvement and enables it to grow profitably.
Education and Training
• The most important element in any
organizational transformation initiative is
that of education and training
• These are especially critical in transitioning
an organization from a mass-production
paradigm to a Lean-production paradigm
Achieving an Extended Lean Enterprise
• A lean transformation is not complete until it reaches
beyond the immediate company to include customers
and suppliers in the overall Lean system design
• Only in this way can the complete value stream be
structured and optimized in accordance with Lean
principles and practices
Summary
• There is only one effective organizational structure for
anyone else seeking to become Lean and that is one
built around Value Streams.
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The value stream is the core structure of a Lean
Organization
• The objective is for organization is to become world
class, create a seamless process of taking a product
concept to customer deliver
• Remove waste that occurs in all functional interfaces
of the organization
Summary
• Identify the set of tasks to be optimized and
synchronized
• Performance metrics are only useful at the value
stream level
• Lean Organizational Structure is the only structure that
can bring all of the best thinking and best efforts in
the organization to bear on sustainable, bottom line
improvements