The idea of lean management techniques go back to Henry Ford and recently the Toyota Company from Japan. It was originally known as the ‘just in time’ principles of production and delivery. As with all great concepts it has become larger and adapted to the needs of the more modern corporate world. This new approach to waste management within core business operations is a set of principles and techniques that lean management consultants use to inspect anything in the operation that is not specifically related to upgrading the value derived from the product by the client.

The sequence of events that a entity receives in the lean consulting process is as follows. The consultant gets the brief for the scope of the project. The contract could be based around the whole business or just a small part of the identified business system. The next stage is the assessment of the process itself, all consultants will have their own system for doing this and, as such, it would be better to describe the generic process. The consultant will produce a report and recommended implementations to the function they have studied.

There are so many areas of the entity that it can be applied to, but so often it is not used on processes that are considered ‘new’. We can all see that using such an proposal on say a manufacturing systems but find it much harder to consider the idea of, say, software outsourcing or lean websites. The more that companies use these techniques and concepts the more wasteful parts of a business’s output can be inspected and discarded. This will always lead to the incredible possibility of improving the staff efficiency without loss of quality.