How do you know you are improving if you don’t know where you started? Let’s imagine I was feeling cold and I wanted it to be warmer in the office. After about an hour, how would we know its getting warmer? I could say I “feel” like its warmer. But is it really? In order to truly know it’s getting warmer in the room, we need to have a baseline; a starting point. If I was to go to the thermostat and say, “Its 65 degrees Fahrenheit in the room and I want it to be 72 degrees,” now that’s a different story. When I go back to look at the thermostat an hour later, I will see that the room is now 68 degrees; knowing we started at 65 degrees. The 65 degree mark becomes my baseline and I know if its getting better or worse each time I review our current state in regards to the baseline. We can compare many examples in this way: diet, blood pressure, time to run a 5k, etc.

Similarly, when you’re deploying lean thinking, in order to improve the processes inside an organization, you need to make sure that you correctly see what’s happening before you implement the improvements. And for this, you need the Baseline. The Baseline is like a snapshot taken at a specific time of all the inputs and outputs for a particular process.

Like the thermostat example, this is very important to do because if you fail on doing it, you won’t have a comparison point. By looking at how the process is doing before you implement any improvements or changes to the process itself, you’ll be able to later compare these with the results that you’ll get after applying the process improvements.

You will know if you are moving in the right direction, or the wrong direction.

Every organization has a culture and a current condition. The culture and current condition was not built up over night. It represents decades or more of practice and development. A true and accurate assessment of operations will more than likely result in a total re-alignment of resources to lean thinking philosophy. This may mean small changes for the better in employees daily work. And, for management, it will call for leaders to re-think strategy, organization and policy, and to implement incremental changes to the management system.

Here are six steps to conducting your own baseline lean assessment of your operations:

Step 1: Develop your assessment categories and scoring criteria. What categories are important to measure when it comes to beliefs, behavior, actions, and results on your lean journey? (CLICK HERE FOR GBMP’s 16 CATEGORIES)

Step 2: Determine what ‘GOOD’ looks like. This should be included in your scoring criteria; but it is important that you know your true north. What is the vision for your future state? What would it look like for you to be ‘world class’ in your industry?

Step 3: Conduct a current state analysis and gap assessment. Use your categories and scoring criteria to give yourself an accurate score. Those people closest to the value-creating work should be part of assessing the current state.

Step 4: Prioritize your opportunities. You cannot and should not work on everything at once. Break down your assessment to show those areas with lowest scores and create priority for items.

Step 5: Conduct root-cause analysis on those items you have prioritized for improvement. Once root cause is determined, brainstorm solutions.

Step 6: Develop action plans to improve your baseline score. Assign owners and due dates. Re-assess every 90 days minimum.

We believe it is management’s role to continuously assess the current condition of the Lean implementation and provide appropriate support and motivation to raise the bar. However, many times, organizations don’t know what they don’t know. And they surely don’t know where to start!

Our team at Lean Solutions is offering a limited time FREE 1-day assessment of your operations to assist you in finding your Baseline. During our time on site, we assess your operations on a scale of 0 (Absence) to 5 (Becoming World Class). Our 1-day assessment categories include ‘People: Empowered Employees’, ‘Process: Vision & Strategy’, ‘Process: Lean Fundamentals’, ‘Process: Just-in-Time’, and “Process: Quality’.

We work with clients to identify, develop and implement continuous improvement projects, cost reductions, product quality enhancements, and process effectiveness improvement. We will deliver a suggested Lean Journey Road Map with no obligation to your organization.