What Are Lean Services?

Overview of Lean Service Lean service is through changes in system structure, personnel organization, operation mode, and market supply and demand, so that the service system can quickly adapt to the changing needs of users, and can make everything useless and redundant in the service process Streamline and ultimately achieve the best results in all aspects of services, including marketing. "At the core of lean thinking is less and less investment-less manpower, less equipment, shorter time and more Small venues create as much value as possible; at the same time getting closer and closer to users, providing what they really want.

Lean service

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Overview of Lean Service Lean service is through changes in system structure, personnel organization, operation mode, and market supply and demand, so that the service system can quickly adapt to the changing needs of users, and can make all useless and redundant things in the service process Streamline and ultimately achieve the best results in all aspects of services, including marketing. "At the core of lean thinking is less and less investment-less manpower, less equipment, shorter time and more Small venues create as much value as possible; at the same time getting closer and closer to users, providing what they really want.

The concept of "lean" originally came from

The essence of lean service is to make the service more perfect, and the service is more perfect reflected in three aspects: one is more efficient service, the other is better service quality, and the third is better service efficiency. The three are a progressive relationship, service efficiency is improved, customer waiting time is shortened, service is more standardized, and service quality is improved. Improved efficiency, improved quality, increased customer value, increased customer satisfaction, customers are more willing to pay for good services, so the benefits of services will be better.

Lean service aims to make service more perfect. Among service companies, lean service is a strategy, an operating system, and a culture.

Principles for Lean Services:

(1) Determine value from the perspective of the customer, not from the perspective of a company, department or institution;

(2) Determine service design, technical standards, service processes, service processes,

Before the concept of lean production came into being, the American fast food industry had lean ideas. McDonald's and KFC are pioneers of lean thinking. Without Lean, McDonald's and KFC cannot become the giants of the global fast food industry. Some examples of McDonald's and KFC as lean models of service companies

Lean Service Lean Thinking Enterprise

Not too much, many aspects of its operating process coincide with Lean, such as its production process design, its flexible staffing, and its pulling production model, which has made KFC and McDonald's fast. "Fast" has also become the second core competitiveness beyond its deliciousness. KFC also used the "challenge 60 seconds" method to promote his fast. In addition to McDonald's and KFC, the experience of Jefferson Pilot Financial (JPF) in the United States also shows that service companies can also use lean principles to improve performance and increase company revenue.

JPF Lean Services JPF Corporation Lean

Case: Lean by Jefferson Pilot Financial

Jefferson Pilot Financial (JPF) is a typical service-oriented company in the United States in the late 1990s. After acquiring 4 companies, it began to look for new ways to grow. JPF executives realized that to attract independent life insurance consultants who sell policies and provide related services, companies must find a way to stand out from the competition. In order to become the preferred partner of these insurance consultants, it began to make every effort to shorten the processing cycle of insurance policies, simplify the policy submission process, and reduce the error rate. In order to improve the quality of operations, the management of JPF has set their sights on the lean production system. This method is based on the concept of continuous flow operation, which is different from the traditional production system where each process is implemented in batches. JPF believes that its own business processes are also dealing with some physical "service products", just like cars on the assembly line, and also go through a series of processing procedures, from receiving policy applications, underwriting or risk assessment to the final The policy is issued, so it can learn from the concept of lean production.

JPF has a new business unit as a pilot and assigned a "lean team" to rebuild the department's operating system and set up a "demonstration unit" first. This demonstration unit is the epitome of the entire process of the JPF. Although the sparrow is small, it has all the internal organs. In this way, managers can conduct preliminary experiments, find and remove defects early, and finally get the optimal solution.

The lean team tried 7 design methods of lean production, including: closely linking related processes together, formulating standardized operating procedures, eliminating the phenomenon of work returning to the previous link, setting a uniform working rhythm, evenly distributing the workload, and Complex tasks are separated from general tasks, and performance results are made public. These measures have achieved good results, reduced waste, eliminated bottlenecks, and improved efficiency. For example, the new business department separates insurance policies that require health certification from insurance policies that do not require health certification, and the latter's processing cycle is immediately reduced by more than 80%.

The company recognizes that in order to implement the Lean philosophy, it is necessary to completely reform its cost, quality and speed measurement system to measure performance and productivity from the customer's perspective. As a result, they have established a set of customer-focused metrics, changing the mentality of employees who "just work on their own". The company also applied another important principle of lean production: linking the work performance of front-line employees with the performance of the company's CEO to align organizational activities with strategic goals. The performance evaluation indicator of JPF's CEO is the ratio between the company's expenses for obtaining a new policy and the company's new premium collection. The performance evaluation indicator of the employee who is responsible for inputting the application policy materials is the number of insurance policy inputs per hour. Therefore, the success of the CEO is directly linked to the productivity of each front-line employee.

The pilot of the demonstration unit successfully inspired the Lean Group, which rolled out the system to all the company's business units within 18 months. In the promotion work, in order to convince employees of the value of the Lean concept, they also conducted sufficient communication work, not only explaining how to implement it, but also explaining why the Lean principle should be implemented, and letting employees thoroughly understand the benefits of doing so through a game of folding airplanes , The staff quickly applied the knowledge learned from the game to the actual work.