Lean in UK Government: internal efficiency or customer service?

Abstract

This paper draws on service operations and Lean management in considering the relationship between internal service processes and customer service in public sector organisations. It draws on extensive evidence from two case studies of large UK Government departments to illustrate that whilst public service organisations recognise that methodologies such as Lean improves their internal processes to date they have not linked this to value or customer service. The paper presents a model which shows that public service organisations are driven towards internal operations improvement due to the efficiency agenda leading to a process focus, rather than a market driven approach focusing on the customer. The paper argues that although this starting point is not necessarily bad in order to sustain improvement after initial gains there is a need to focus on both process and customer. The paper therefore contributes and extends the discussion on the adaptation of Lean for a public sector context.

Lean thinking: outside-in, bottom-up? The paradox of contemporary soft lean and consultant-driven lean implementation

“…However, our case study brings together and elaborates on two other well-known causes for implementation failure. First, 'hard' and technical lean at the bottom of the organisational hierarchy, founded on an efficiency logic, has been shown to lead to sub-optimisation and lack of customer value (Radnor & Johnston, 2013;Radnor & Osborne, 2013). Second, critics of management consultancy blame it for conning organisations into faddish concepts by appealing rhetoric (Alvesson, 2012;Jung & Kieser, 2012).…”

The role of Lean at the interface with between operations management and applied services within a large aerospace organisation: a boundary spanning perspective

“…Hines et al (2004), consistent with Biege et al (2012), highlighted the need to address Lean's applicability outside a manufacturing environment in dealing with variability and its limited consideration of people related issues in OM -AS interfaces. The literature shows that there has been considerably less research in the application of Lean in OM -AS interfaces in comparison to that of product-based activities such as OM (Arlbjørn et al, 2011 andRadnor andJohnston, 2013;Del Palacio et al, 2011;Piercy and Rich, 2009). Lean in OM -AS has been identified as a key area for further research and development, typically within large organisations which is the focus of this paper (e.g.…”

“…Moreover, there was an organisational-wide promulgation of product based Lean PMs applied to all departments including production and applied services (Figure 1). Hence there was a need to explore how OM -AS actors perceived and interpreted these Lean PMs and demands, within the OM-AS interface space as suggested by Arlbjorn and Freytag (2013) and Radnor and Johnston (2013). Hence the first research question is as follows.…”

“…Lean emerged in the 1990s to describe the production processes used by Toyota since the 1950s and refers to the use of less space, time, manpower and material than traditional production processes (Martinez-Jirado and Moyano-Fuentes, 2014;Staats et al, 2011;Radnor and Johnston, 2013). A typical definition is that of Wang et al (2012, p5): "Lean is defined as the perfection pursued by the elimination of waste, coupled with the insertion of practices that contribute to cost reduction and schedule while improving performance of products, processes and organisation as a whole."…”

Defining Lean Change—Framing Lean Implementation in Organizational Development

“…However the methods and challenges of change are not industry specific (Balle, 2011;Bateman, Hines, & Davidson, 2014;Lander & Liker, 2007;Womack & Jones, 1996). Hence the thinking may be applied and adapted to many other situations such as service (Hadid & Mansouri, 2014), food supply (Vlachos, 2015), public sector (Bateman et al, 2014;Radnor & Johnston, 2013), knowledge work (McDermott & Venditti, 2015), construction (Sertyesilisik, 2014;Tommelein, 2015), and other industries.…”