Lean Service: Reassessment of Lean Manufacturing for Service Activities

After decades of lean principles implementation in manufacturing companies, there is no debate about its benefits on waste elimination and efficiency improvement. Service organizations, a growing stake of the global economy, are committed to achieve such improvements. Considering current economic scenario, marked by budget cuts and cost reduction, outstanding results are expected from the application of lean manufacturing into service management. However, results may not be as expected when trying to apply technical tools, developed for industrial processes, to intangible products. This paper intends to redefine value and waste concepts, focused on the inherent characteristics of service: intangibility, perishability, inseparability, variability and lack of ownership. Based on this approach, an analysis of customer value and customer life cycle (end-to-end process) is performed. Finally, lean methodologies are assessed in order to extend their applicability to service environment. These results can be useful to provide a practical guideline to implement lean service. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.