Lean services

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title: "Lean services" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["lean-manufacturing", "customer-service"] topic_path: "general/lean-manufacturing" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_services" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

Lean services is the application of lean manufacturing production methods in the service industry (and related method adaptations). Lean services have among others been applied to US health care providers and the UK HMRC. higher education, software development, and public and professional services. Conceptually, these implementations follow very similar routes to those in manufacturing settings, and often use some of the same tools and techniques. There are, however, many significant distinctions and the same tools can be applied in different ways. --

Services

Lean principles have been successfully applied to various sectors and services, such as call centers and healthcare. In the former, lean's waste reduction practices have been used to reduce handle time, within and between agent variation, accent barriers, as well as attain near perfect process adherence. In the latter, several hospitals have adopted the idea of lean hospital, a concept that priorizes the patient, thus increasing the employee commitment and motivation, as well as boosting medical quality and cost effectiveness.

Lean principles also have applications to software development and maintenance as well as other sectors of information technology (IT). More generally, the use of lean in information technology has become known as Lean IT. Lean methods are also applicable to the public sector, but most results have been achieved using a much more restricted range of techniques than lean provides.

The challenge in moving lean to services is the lack of widely available reference implementations to allow people to see how directly applying lean manufacturing tools and practices can work and the impact it does have. This makes it more difficult to build the level of belief seen as necessary for strong implementation. However, some research does relate widely recognized examples of success in retail and even airlines to the underlying principles of lean. Despite this, it remains the case that the direct manufacturing examples of 'techniques' or 'tools' need to be better 'translated' into a service context to support the more prominent approaches of implementation, which has not yet received the level of work or publicity that would give starting points for implementors. The upshot of this is that each implementation often 'feels its way' along as must the early industrial engineering practices of Toyota. This places huge importance upon sponsorship to encourage and protect these experimental developments.

Lean management is nowadays implemented also in non-manufacturing processes and administrative processes. In non-manufacturing processes is still huge potential for optimization and efficiency increase.--

History

Definition of "Service": see Service, Business Service and/or Service Economics. Lean Services history, see Lean manufacturing.

Lean manufacturing and Services, contrasted by Levitt; "Manufacturing looks for solutions inside the very tasks to be done... Service looks for solutions in the performer of the task." (T.Levitt, Production-Line Approach to Service, Harvard Business Review, September 1972). not limited to office or administration, but also wider service situations that are not necessarily repetitive, where task time is not applicable, and where task times may be both long and variable. Service in this context could mean anything from a hospital to a university, from an office process to a consultancy, and from a warehouse to field service maintenance. "Service" refers to the service concept or product service bundle, which are all the activities that provide value to the customer along a value stream. --

Method

Underlying method; Lean manufacturing.

Bicheno & Holweg provides an adapted view on waste for the method ("waste", see Lean manufacturing, waste and The Toyota Way, principle 2):

  1. Delay on the part of customers waiting for service, for delivery, in queues, for response, not arriving as promised.
  2. Duplication. Having to re-enter data, repeat details on forms, copy information across, answer queries from several sources within the same organisation.
  3. Unnecessary Movement. Queuing several times, lack of one-stop, poor ergonomics in the service encounter.
    • Unclear communication*, and the wastes of seeking clarification, confusion over product or service use, wasting time finding a location that may result in misuse or duplication.
  5. Incorrect inventory. Being out-of-stock, unable to get exactly what was required, substitute products or services.
  6. An opportunity lost to retain or win customers, a failure to establish rapport, ignoring customers, unfriendliness, and rudeness.
  7. Errors in the service transaction, product defects in the product-service bundle, lost or damaged goods.
  8. Service quality errors, lack of quality in service processes.

Shillingburg and Seddon separately provides an additional type of waste for the method:

  1. Value Demand, services demanded by the customer. Failure Demand, production of services as a result of defects in the upstream system.
  • Failure Demand is the demand caused by a failure to do something right for the customer. Failure demand is thus demand that only exists because initial demand was not satisfied properly. For example, a large proportion of calls that call centers receive are either chasing down enquiries made earlier, or to correct earlier work that was not done properly. As one of the key aims of "Lean" is to eliminate waste, Failure Demand represents an obvious type of waste in service organizations.
  • This would include administrative rework, audits, inspections and enquires. This non value-added work can account for the majority of administrative work performed.
  • By treating Failure and Value demand alike in statistical analysis, failure demand can give the quite false impression of greater productivity. This merely reinforces the need to look at what is really going on, and ask why the service is being rendered.-- In recent years, some practitioners have combined Lean and Six Sigma principles to yield a methodology commonly known as Lean Six Sigma. One of the earliest adopters of this is Honeywell, which calls its program Six Sigma Plus. Like some other practitioners, GE has developed a very rigorous Lean Six Sigma training program in which certain employees are chosen to become certified in this area.--

Criticism

John Seddon outlines challenges with Lean Services in his paper "Rethinking Lean Service" (Seddon 2009) using examples from the UK tax-authorities HMRC.

5S in the office

5S has been widely and successfully applied in office environments, however this has received some criticism for resulting in workplaces that are too clinical or impersonal.

Application of Lean in creative environments

Critics of Lean Service have suggested that problems arise when companies try to apply "Lean principles" to areas where creativity, ability to react to rapid external changes, need to spend an extensive amount of time to convince external parties (typically lobbying) or ability to successfully negotiate are needed; and that the downsides of Lean are reduced / eliminated creativity and ability to cope with the unexpected.

Proponents of Lean Service, however, suggest that these criticisms are a response to Lean implementations that have failed to properly understand Lean as a holistic, action based management and implementation system to provide enhanced customer value, a "Tools" mentality instead of an outcomes orientation and an inadequate knowledge of how to utilize and adapt Lean manufacturing methods to the service environment.--

References

  • Balzer, William K. (2010) "Lean Higher Education, Increasing the Value and Performance of University Processes", Productivity Press.
  • Hanna, Julia - HBS - Bringing "Lean" Principles to service industry, published 22 October 2007.
  • Stüer, Philipp (2015), Gestaltung industrieller Dienstleistungen nach Lean-Prinzipien (Design of Industrial Services according to Lean Principles), Apprimus Verlag. .
  • Swank, C.K. (2003). The Lean Service Machine. Harvard Business Review 81 (10), 123-129 (case study of Lean in transaction-intensive services)
  • Womack, J.P., Jones, D.T., (2005) Lean Consumption. Harvard Business Review 83 (3), 58-6, " --

Womack & Jones (2005) for a correct use of lean in services it is necessary to apply important principles, such as: completely solve the customers’ problems by ensuring that all services operate and, especially, work together, and do not waste the customers’ time, provide exactly what they want, exactly where and when wanted. Maister (1985) also suggested two “service laws”: the first compares customers expectations with their perceptions of service delivery - if the perceived service is better than the expectations, they turnout to become happy customers. The second law states that the first impression can influence the rest of the service consumption experience. Based on this statement, there are two fundamental variables in the relationship of service delivery:--

References

  1. Ker, Jun-Ing. (2014). "Deploying lean in healthcare: Evaluating information technology effectiveness in U.S. hospital pharmacies". Elsevier BV.
  2. Seddon, John. (2011). "Service Design and Delivery". Springer US.
  3. (11 June 2007). "Cutting-Edge Methods Help Target Real Call Center Waste". iSixSigma.com.
  4. (2015). "The Better Hospital: Excellence Through Leadership And Innovation". Medizinisch Wissenschaftliche verlagsgesellschaft.
  5. Hanna, Julia. “[http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5741.html Bringing ‘Lean’ Principles to Service Industries]”. ''HBS Working Knowledge''. October 22, 2007. (Summary article based on published research of Professor David Upton of Harvard Business School and doctoral student Bradley Staats: Staats, Bradley R., and David M. Upton. “Lean Principles, Learning, and Software Production: Evidence from Indian Software Services.”. Harvard Business School Working Paper. No. 08-001. July 2007. (Revised July 2008, March 2009.)
  6. (2006). "Evaluation of the Lean Approach to Business Management and ITs Use in the Public Sector". Scottish Executive Social Research.
  7. JANUŠKA, M., ŠŤASTNÁ, L. Industrial Engineering in the Non-manufacturing Processes. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Business Information Management Association Conference. neuveden: International Business Information Management Association (IBIMA), 2013. s. 747-766. {{ISBN. 978-0-9860419-1-4
  8. (September 1972). "Production-Line Approach to Service". Harvard Business Review.
  9. (2009). "The Lean Toolbox". PICSIE.
  10. Seddon, John (2003) ''Freedom from Command and Control: A Better Way to Make the Work Work'', Vanguard Press.
  11. Shillingburg, 2011

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