Dana Ginn and Lynda Finn of Oriel Inc., with input from Oriel’s Kevin Kelleher and Amita Sherwood, describe some common lean implementation mistakes and how to avoid them.

Many manufacturing and service organizations have implemented lean successfully and transformed their organizations to a culture of lean thinking. These companies have improved quality and flow, reduced cost and waste, improved productivity and safety, reduced lead times, and increased customer satisfaction, profitability, and market share. They have changed the cultures of their organizations—not only solving problems, but creating a workforce of problem solvers.

But the path to lean is fraught with many obstacles. Here are some common mistakes to look out for on the road to successful lean implementation:

Working on projects that don’t support your strategy.
Consequence: Small gains in process performance don’t translate to improvements in strategic measures. Projects tend to be inefficient—duplicating efforts and resources, and creating higher than necessary costs.

Remedy: Use a structured selection and prioritization process that directly links projects to the business strategy. A road map can help you identify what needs to happen at the corporate level and in what sequence. You can be more confident that you’re working on critical strategic areas if you “see the waste” first by creating value stream maps of your key product and service families. Implement changes and provide a solid review system to ensure strategic benefits are realized.

Confounding the lean rollout with other initiatives.
Consequence: Staff loses direction and motivation.

Remedy: Frequently, companies have other approaches
they want to deploy with lean. Articulate how these initiatives support each other and position lean as building on, rather than replacing, past or even other current approaches. Otherwise you risk setting up competing “improvement camps” in your company, with people bickering about which method is more useful rather than focusing on the best tools or method for the job.

Not providing the infrastructure to guarantee success.
Consequence: The efforts (and therefore the benefits) don’t go beyond addressing the basic type of improvements. People don’t take the initiative seriously, momentum is not sustainable, and business objectives may not be met.

Remedy: Lean is a specialized discipline. While the basics are relatively easy to use, you will need to put the right infrastructure and people in place to provide expert support. Outside experts can be used initially, but you will want to develop internal experts who can help with training, facilitation, and coordination. Internal experts help ensure lean approaches are used in a standard manner and projects are aligned to corporate goals. Educate leaders on their roles and responsibilities—leaders are ultimately responsible for holding the gains made and for aligning lean efforts to the business strategy.

Focusing too much on end results and not enough on people.
Consequence: You obtain short-term payback, but not long-term gains.

Remedy: Build internal capabilities and develop problem solvers throughout the organization. Use a road map to provide a standard model for implementation and make lean easier and more accessible to your staff. It’s the learning and experience of your employees that creates the benefits from lean. Educate, train, and empower your staff to be self-sufficient. Talk with employees to find out what they need to support their work. Help staff learn the approaches, tools, and techniques to improve and develop them to be better leaders.

Not focusing on the underlying drivers of waste.
Consequence: Problems tend to reoccur, and benefits are not sustainable.

Remedy: Use a systematic approach to identify and address the types of waste, as well as the waste drivers. Waste, such as errors or delays, is often caused by overburden, unevenness, management policies, and design of products and processes. These drivers generate insidious forms of waste—the kinds that are often accepted as simply “part of doing business.”

Viewing lean as separate from the “real work” of the organization.
Consequence: It will be tough to convince people that cultural change is desired when lean is not integral to the business. Eventually, time, production, and delivery pressures will sabotage your efforts.

Remedy: Integrate lean thinking into existing management systems. Tie management and employee review, reward, and recognition policies to the implementation effort. Do your incentives promote standardization, teamwork, and elimination of waste? Or do incentives promote overburden and unevenness? Will people lose their jobs as a result of improvements?

Ignoring the importance of engaged leadership.
Consequence: Lean efforts fade quickly when other business pressures become more “critical” and employees see that leadership is not committed.

Remedy: Lean efforts will succeed only if your organization’s leaders believe it is in the company’s and their best interests to make sure it succeeds. Actively engage leadership by 1) launching a lean deployment on a key leadership process such as acquisition, strategic planning, or new product introduction, 2) building lean implementation into executives’ and managers’ current methods of reviewing the business, and 3) having executives take the lead in the review of the overall initiative and individual lean projects.

Taking on too much in the initial rollout.
Consequence: Staff becomes overwhelmed, overburdened, and confused; motivation and excitement eventually wane.

Remedy: Encourage small steps and build on success. It’s tempting to look for home runs, but success is more likely if you start out addressing problems you can easily solve. Publicizing these small victories and the people who achieved them can go a long way to creating a culture that values lean thinking. Accept that lean implementations progress through a natural maturity process. Early on, executives typically allow local worksite implementation on well-defined projects, ensuring that employees gain experience with lean approaches and tools by working on problems they care about. As employees get better at using lean approaches and tools, the company adheres to a strategic model for most lean projects, but allows, and actively supports, employees to use lean approaches and tools ad hoc when they run into problems they know can be tackled using lean.

Avoid these common mistakes on the path to lean and you’ll transform your organization. You’ll create a lean culture where employees not only solve problems, but become a workforce of problem solvers.

Oriel, Inc., a SAM Group Company, is dedicated to helping organizations improve business performance. Headquartered in Madison, Wis., with consultants and affiliates nationwide, Oriel can be contacted at (800)669-8326 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .