For many years, we have been conducting lean audits for private equities during due diligence and fortune 500 companies for continuous improvements. 5 years ago the focus and the customer demand was on lean manufacturing audits to see the leanness current state before the transaction. This offers a measurement against the future state = the results of ongoing lean conversions and kaizens afterwards. All companies focused on lean production. The bigger potential is hidden in management, services, sales and even culture (HR). For this reason we developed a few years ago various lean audits to show the leanness level of the „non-production“ areas. Today, our lean audit packages includes:
- lean management audit (strategy deployment)
- lean culture audit
- lean services audit (sales, service, marketing)
- lean manufacturing audit
Now, it’s payback time for the investment we’ve done by creating this packages and applying them in the past just as add-ons to lean manufacturing. The demand is growing and we are happy to announce that 50% of customer requests for lean audits includes at least one of the non-production floor packages. We even got requests from insurance companies and banks to conduct only service audits.
It seems like our customer start to go for the „full monty“, in the double meaning of this slang phrase. Our customer want to get the full picture. They take the risk to face the naked truth about their company situation and they are going to see the great potential lying in front of them.
History repeats itself. We see the same happen to audits in various situation and stages of a company life-cycle as it happen to due diligence. Due diligence history started with pure financial due diligence. Today good companies conduct due diligence about production, marketing, management, hr, etc.
No lean manufacturing will guarantee survival of a company if all other functions are not synchronized. Think about it. It’s time to go for the full monty.