Lean Services

Lean principles have been successfully applied to various sectors and services. For example, call center services use these principles to improve live agent call handling. By combining agent‐assisted automation and lean’s waste reduction practices, a company reduced handle time, reduced between agent variability, reduced accent barriers, and attained near perfect process adherence (Padmane et al. 2013).

Lean principles also have applications to software development and maintenance as well as other sectors of information technology (IT) (Hanna 2007). More generally, the use of lean in IT 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 (Radnor et al. 2006).

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 (Ruffa 2008). 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 implementers. 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 nonmanufacturing processes and administrative processes. In nonmanufacturing processes, lean management is still a huge potential for optimization and efficiency increase (Januska and Stastna 2013).