Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Abstract
Lean thinking nowadays is widely applied by organisations worldwide. Lean
was discovered to generate efficiencies and help the company continuously
cut production costs. This concept harvests success reaching its goal to
create the most efficient and wasteless work system in every organisation
applying it. Hence, this remarkable concept is currently adopted by many nonmanufacturing organizations including higher educational institution. Like
manufacturing, universities are struggling to deliver valuable services while
maintaining a good financial position. Applying lean facilitate them to improve
productivity, generate efficiencies and help them continuously cut irrelevant
costs. This article gives a brief glimpse on how to promote lean concept in
university by utilizing lean tools and principles. It also reveals several steps
that can be applied when starting lean program in university.
1. Introduction
These days, when increasing demands for higher levels of
performance makes most of organisations in the world compete to
build efficient processes in their working system, an effective concept
is needed to guide this effort. Lean is one of the most common
concepts applied in many manufacture companies. Born in the
factories of Toyota Motor Corp., lean concept has objectives to reduce
waste, generates efficiencies and helps companies continuously cut
production costs. Lean works through a simple idea: continuous
improvement and innovation leads to value creation and the
elimination of waste.
Lean history started in 1945, when Sakichi Toyoda, the owner of
Toyota Motor Corp. challenged Toyotas Chief Engineer, Taiichi Ohno
Sunday Noya
institutions that are willing to face the reality may choose to adapt the
way many managers do. They can lay people off, cut programs,
reduce services expenditure, and compress employment salary and
benefit. However, the results are always unconstructive: unhappy
customers and staff, and low morale in the workplace. Actually, a
better way to deal with reality would be to apply lean as a method to
reduce costs, improve quality, simplify processes, gain market share,
stabilize employment, and satisfy customers.
4. Implementing Lean in University
Alagaraja (2010) enlighten that traditional educational method have
adopted a mass production attitude of teaching and learning, with all
its limitations for decades. To be effective nowadays, university must
take the lean approach to solve the students problems completely
and give them exactly what they need and want in a cost-effective
way, at a competitive price, and with minimal time wasted.
The main question is how we apply lean tingking in university. Lean
concept in university is promoted by leadership and of course the
utilization of lean tools. For example, value stream mapping. This tool
explores the views of key stakeholders such as students, lecturer,
parents, management, administrators, government and board
members in concern to what is considered as value. A students
instructional day is then mapped out, looking at the distribution of time
and resources for a variety of activities. Based on the sight of the
stakeholders, assessment would be made which is value and which is
not during that instructional day. Value is kept and what is not is
eliminated.
Other lean tools are also can be applied to support continuous
improvement of every process in university. Still pointing to Alagaraja
(2010), there are several key principles and tools of lean that can be
adapted to higher education system. They are such as hoshin kanri,
a strategic planning methodology that uses a PDCA cycle (Plan-DoCheck-Act) to create goals, choose milestones, and link daily control
activities to organisation strategy. Using this tool we can associate the
purpose of a course with objectives and activities. The next principle is
flow. Utilize this tool, we may encourage student so that they can stay
Sunday Noya
Sunday Noya
References
Alagaraja, M. 2010. Lean Thinking as Applied to the Adult Education
Environment. Int.J. Human Resources Development and
Management. Vol 10, 51-62
Blossom,
P.
2009.
Brief
History
of
Lean.(Online)
(http://leanpracticecoach.com/brief-history-of-lean/,
retrieved
03 May 2010)
Boone, E. 2010. Going Lean. ABI/INFORM Global, February: pg. 102.
Sunday Noya