From Traditional Lean to Digital Lean: What Changes for the Business?

The Birth of Digital Lean

Traditional Lean Management is a work management and organisation method aimed at improving business performance. It was created in the early 1960s by the Japanese industrialist Taiichi Ohno for Toyota's production system. By eliminating all non-value-adding activities within a business, this method has remained highly popular since its inception.

However, Lean Management as originally conceived is sometimes poorly suited to new digital businesses. In other words, it is not necessarily adapted to new digital tools and modern production, management, and communication methods.

To embrace the profound changes brought about by the fourth industrial revolution, traditional Lean evolved into Digital Lean.

The Tools of Digital Lean

Digital Lean therefore uses digital solutions to apply the principles of traditional Lean. By leveraging digital tools, it enables the identification and reduction of the wastes identified by traditional Lean:

• Unnecessary movement,

• Unnecessary processing,

Digital Lean therefore adopts a wide variety of problem-solving methods and innovative tools to improve the production chain of businesses, and thus address the challenges facing today's organisations.

Improving Communication and Customer Relations

One such challenge is communication and customer relations. By placing the customer at the heart of concerns, traditional Lean had already emphasised the importance of these relationships and of marketing communication. Thanks to new innovative tools, Digital Lean offers a more modern, intuitive, and effective communication system.

Real-time communication platforms, such as Teams for example, enable smoother and more effective communication between colleagues.

Furthermore, exchanges between manufacturer and customer have also been greatly streamlined and intensified through digital tools. Powerful software now makes it possible to collect crucial information about consumers, such as their preferences, purchasing behaviour, and expectations, in order to improve the customer experience.

Digital Lean also enables productivity optimisation and the pursuit of operational excellence.

Improving Existing Methods

Drawing on the principles of traditional Lean, Digital Lean also builds upon some of its methods, enhancing them through technology.

Let us look at some examples of these methods transformed by digital technology.

As a reminder, the Gemba Walk is a Lean continuous improvement tool that involves moving around the business to identify waste and eliminate it more effectively. The term Gemba comes from Japanese and literally means "where things happen".

During the Gemba Walk, the company leader or a manager goes directly to the field — to the place where value is created. Depending on the organisation, this may be the factory, the shop floor, or a service counter, for example. They then observe employees' working conditions, the problems encountered on the ground, and the most frequent sources of waste. In doing so, managers are better placed to understand production issues and to engage directly with operators.

With digital tools, managers can obtain information directly, wherever they are in the organisation. This enables easier communication with operators — having already identified the problem, anticipating it, and rapidly proposing a solution.

• Digital visual management

Drawing on the principles of visual management — which involves creating structured routines around a board in order to manage objectives as a team — Lean Digital uses digital tools to multiply the benefits of this approach.

It makes it possible to:

• Manage several projects in parallel without having to multiply physical boards,

• Review projects without having to travel to a specific location,

• Use ready-made visual formats that have already been tested and approved by other teams,

• Benefit from additional features such as training programmes, surveys, and voting systems.

In a continuous improvement approach, it is essential to define indicators that track business activity and measure the effectiveness of changes made. Thanks to digital technology, these indicators can be consulted in real time on screens deployed across the shop floor. Everyone can thus monitor the overall production situation and adjust their activity accordingly.

From traditional Lean to Lean Digital: intelligent digitalisation

As we have seen, the digitalisation of organisations enables them to embed a continuous improvement approach, limiting waste in order to enhance performance. It thus echoes the fundamental principles of Lean:

• The central place of the customer,

• The optimisation of processes,

• The reduction of non-value-adding activities,

• The recognition of the human factor within the organisation, etc.

In other words, Lean Digital takes the principles of traditional Lean and builds on the new possibilities offered by technology, thereby broadening the scope for optimisation.