Lean management and operations in the global professional services industry

Abstract

Lean philosophy and techniques have a 50-year history being successfully implemented in many organisations. There cannot be many secrets about what Lean is and what is required to achieve it. Nevertheless, we find only few truly Lean organisations in the service industry. The tertiary sector has often unique operational characteristics with most of the work virtually enabled within globally dispersed information technology systems. Our major focus is hence on the critical success factors for implementing Lean, required to sustain continuous improvement culture in a long run. The below article is based on the experiences we have gathered across ten different countries on four continents. This helps us to integrate the cross-cultural and people-related aspects on top of Lean methods. The following chapters offer insights into achieving an effective and sustainable organisational change through structured implementation of Lean. The ultimate goal is to provide a practical reference guide on how to implement Lean in the service industry.