Small and Medium Enterprises often do not have at their disposal many resources to perform their activities. It is essential, therefore, that they are as effective as possible in exploiting them in order to maximize their productivity and, consequently, their profitability.
One of the best ways of achieving such ambitious goals is that of resorting to the management method known as “Lean Management”. This method aims at obtaining better performances by using as less resources as possible (avoiding if possible any wastes in the production phase).
In order to bear its fruits at best, firms implementing Lean Management must always keep in mind which is the value that they provide with their service or product to customers, using that as a starting point to improve their internal processes.
Such internal processes, moreover, must be perfectly understood and planned so that will be possible to understand what can be improved and what instead is already perfectly working; any delay or imperfection of the workflow must be carefully assessed or the good functioning of the method will be at stake.
Lean Management works by adapting the whole production phase to the demands and requirements of customers rather than on forecasts or pre-determined sales/marketing strategies, in order to avoid any effort that will not be matched by purchasers’ desires.
Lean Management requires the presence of a Lean Manager that will also analyze all the feedbacks that will come from both employees and customers to further improve the production processes.
Besides the positive impact on productivity, Lean Management is beneficial also for the work routine of employees improving their time management skills, their independency and knowledge of their tasks.
Lean Management, its functioning and how it can contribute to the success and growth of SMEs are hot topic within INNovaSouth project, in fact we dedicated to this subject one of the 4 eLearning modules which will be available for those companies that will win the Voucher for workplace innovations.
If you want to know more about Lean Management you can also find it in InnovaSouth’s manual here.