The origins of lean management principles go back to Henry Ford and more recently the Toyota Company of Japan. It used to be known as the ‘just in time’ principles of production and delivery. As with all great ideas it has grown and adapted to needs in the modern corporate world. The modern approach to waste management within core business processes is a set of principles and techniques that lean management consultants use to identify anything in the process that is not specifically related to increasing the value derived from the product by the user/customer.

The sequence of events that a company receives in the lean consultinglean consulting process is as follows. The consultant receives the brief for the scope of the project. The project could be based around the whole business or just a small part of a specific business function. The next step is the assessment of the process itself, all consultants will have their own sequence for doing this and as such there is very little point in trying to describe this process. The consultant will produce a report and suggested improvements to the system they have studied.

The whole process, once handed over to a lean consultant, will have little impact on the day to day running of the company. This leaves core personnel to get on with their functions as normal. This effect has to balanced against the cost of engaging the consultant as it’s not so much what their process costs but what other costs it saves.

There are so many areas of business that it can be applied to, but so often it is not used on processes that are considered ‘new’. We can all imagine using such an idea on say a manufacturing process but find it much harder to consider the idea of, say, lean software or lean websites. The more that businesses use these principles and concepts the more wasteful parts of a business’s output can be identified and removed. This will always lead to the exciting possibility of increasing the bottom line without loss of quality.