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Can Lean Work For Your Service Oriented Business Case Study

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CAN LEAN WORK FOR YOUR SERVICE-ORIENTED BUSINESS?

Susan Kinkle
MBA
Operations Management
December 14, 2017
Module 5
Final Paper
Can Lean Work for Your Service-Oriented Business?

Lean processes have been a part of manufacturing businesses for many years. We have studied Fords interchangeable parts and Toyota-style lean methods in our business classes and may have embraced much of the terminology in our own companies. Muda means waste, and there are endless examples of companies that have done great things to limit or nearly eliminate waste. While it is easy to identify the Lean stars of manufacturing, leaning up a service business can be a bit trickier. While entirely possible to do so there are things to
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Alsmadi, M., Almani, A., & Jerisat, R., 2012, p. 382).
In services, Lean must focus on eliminating waste differently than manufacturing. Minimizing lead times between customer demand and fulfillment can be one of the ways to reduce waste. The services sector is now moving towards enhancing the customer experience. With this goal, there should be proper alignment between efforts to improve operational efficiency and achieving more customer satisfaction. (Ganapathy, 2015, p. 5).
For years companies have turned to IT (Information Technology) to make things easier and reduce the waste of paper and human computers. When companies find themselves regularly maintaining and upgrading their software is there room for Lean in software development? With business requirements perpetually changing can a business get to the place where the system is good enough? Cost cutbacks, faster time-to-market, improved products and differentiated services are now the essential pillars in managing any software development process. The shift has been to move away from the customary Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) approach to newer standards that provide higher certainty and decreased risk by ensuring that business deadlines are met. (Pillai, A., Pundir, A., & Ganapathy, L., 2012, p. 107).
As a methodology for waste reduction, one should interpret the Lean concept in the software context in a more significant way. Non-value-added activities in a software environment could be
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