Lean philosophy is about creating flow in your organisation. From enquiry to delivery and all processes in between. Most organisations are created in silo’s so it’s often easy to create significant improvement just by mapping the actual value stream that you deliver and remove the obstacles to flow.
If your customer would be willing to pay for all the processes you do to deliver their needs, then you are going well. Most organisations have far more non-value / cost adding activities that frustrate them, make their throughput time unnecessarily lengthy and the customer ends up paying for it (but they aren’t happy paying the inflated price).
Taking a lean approach to your business is a great way to ‘see’ waste within, and then eliminate it. Tools like value stream mapping highlight waste. 5S allows a systematic organisation of work to reduce time away from value adding activities. Leader-standard work, helps supervisors and managers add real value by supporting their teams. Kaizen events facilitate rapid change in the workplace. There are many tools that maybe applicable, depending on your goals.
Success is a process of discovery, and lean philosophy encourages us to respectfully challenging processes, people and purpose which helps us deliver results.