On the Record: Trim the fat
1 Oct, 2006 By: Ron Hall Landscape ManagementDo you know what "lean" means? I'm not referring to what we would love to see in the mirror after we've lost that 20 pounds. We're talking business. In that respect lean means anti-waste —time and effort in particular.
Lean is what we feel after we start the process of slicing the fat, more precisely the waste, out of our companies. Waste? In the broadest sense, it's anything we do that doesn't in some way result in a benefit or positive action for our customers. Since we're in the landscape and grounds profession that means anything that doesn't improve the appearance (or in the case of sports grounds, safety) of our customers' properties.
Where to start?
Creating value for our customers and meeting their expectations are where we start in the lean process. Lean doesn't mean laying people off or sacrificing quality; it means being more efficient so more work that creates value — to clients and ourselves — gets done.
We start to understand what it can mean after we observe all the different things that we do within our companies each day and ask ourselves, "Why are we doing this task this particular way?" then find a better, more efficient way to perform it. We take the time to look and learn from the people actually doing the tasks and rethink how these individual actions are performed within our operations, our administrative processes, our supply chain, everything, in fact, that affects our companies. Come up better ways to do them.
And we keep the process going.
All about the journey
Lean is not a destination; it's a well-thought-out program that we keep building on. Ultimately it becomes a mindset and a continuing journey.
No company or organization can ever get all the waste out. That would be a company that clicked along at 100% efficiency, which is too unattainable. So we keep looking for ways to remove more waste.
A growing number of Green Industry companies are committing themselves to the process. I learned this on a recent visit to the headquarters of the Ariens Co., whose passion for "lean" is seeping well beyond its home in tiny Brillion, WI. I was among about 90 landscape company owners and managers getting educated about lean at the JP Horizons Face to Face 2006 event.
The process doesn't just work for a manufacturer, such as Ariens, whose 20-year goal is to become one of the top 50 internationally recognized brands in the world. (Its model is Toyota, which now has a market capitalization greater than GM and Ford combined.) Lean is equally valuable for a service company or, for that matter, a grounds department within a university or community.
You will be excited to learn that next month's Landscape Management coverage will be devoted to "lean." It will give you tools that will make your company a lean, green, money-making machine.
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