Lean is a choice

- It's important to remember that lean is a choice. Nobody can make lean happen. It's what you make of it. You can stay stagnant and keep doing things the way they've always been done, or you can seek to continuously improve. Lean uses the term continuous improvement to refer to all aspects of improving processes, products, methodologies and technologies to ensure they provide more value to customers, and they're sustainable. The biggest part of continuous improvement we need to understand is that we need to work smarter and not harder. This is the definition of lean, the pursuit of perfection via a systematic approach to identifying and eliminating ways through continuous improvement of the value stream, enabling the product or information to flow at a rate determined by the pull of the customer. Remember, we're trying to eliminate waste by continually improving using lean tools to satisfy the customer. Lean isn't the next headcount reduction exercise, but instead lean creates opportunities for doing more value added activities. Lean will not succeed if the initiative stays limited to operations. Again, lean is not about working harder, but rather working smarter. By taking this course, you've shown the curiosity and the will to improve. That's a lean mindset. Now let's talk about some of the key concepts of lean, including who it is all about, the customer.