There are two things in the world that are harder to do: one is to put other people's money in your pocket, and the other is to put your ideas in other people's heads.

There are significant difficulties in integrating Lean into long-established corporate culture systems. For enterprises, it is obvious that the lean production method has unparalleled advantages in organizing production operations, but the results of most enterprises' lean transformation efforts are not satisfactory, mainly because people ignore a crucial factor - corporate culture, which makes lean by the surface of the enterprise management activities gradually become habits that It is integrated into the blood of the enterprise and injected into its bone marrow, thus forming the Lean DNA.

Only in this way can the seeds of Lean take root in the company's soil and eventually grow into a flourishing tree. In this regard, only the successful realization of “putting one's own ideas into other people's heads” can be successful, so how can this be done?

01

Connotation of Lean Culture

Enterprise culture is the way to improve the level of enterprise management, but also the success or failure of lean implementation of key factors. Because the competition of enterprise management is the competition of deep culture, the competition of ideology, way of thinking and behavior.

The enterprise culture constructed with lean thinking as the guide, injecting and forming new connotation in the existing enterprise culture, through this “cultural change” and transmission, can give full play to its guiding role, cohesion, constraints, incentives, and enhance the executive power of lean management.

Lean culture has relative stability, is essential, connotative things, once formed, far-reaching impact. The essence is to cause employees to resonate, promote and regulate employee behavior, improve efficiency and effectiveness, and create maximum value with limited resources. The fundamental goal is to change the management concept, innovate the management mode, and promote the management level.

Lean culture reflects crisis awareness, problem awareness and people-oriented awareness. Crisis awareness at all times is the basis for long-term development of the enterprise, born in fear, die in peace and happiness in the enterprise is also applicable, crisis awareness is the power to stimulate people to move forward, can produce upward momentum; found that the problem, in order to solve the problem of the process of continuous improvement, innovation; lean improvement of the source of the power of the staff's conscientiousness, only to fully rely on and give full play to the enthusiasm and creativity of the staff, in order to put the lean culture into practice. Only by fully relying on and utilizing the enthusiasm and creativity of employees can the lean culture be put into practice.

Lean awareness and concepts, through the integration of all processes and all aspects of the production and operation of the enterprise, so that the energy of all elements of productivity to fully release and surge up, you can greatly enhance the implementation of lean management, enhance the core competitiveness of the enterprise, for the sustainable development of the enterprise to win the new power and support.

02

The relationship between lean culture and enterprise culture

Corporate culture is a long-term formation of an enterprise inherent in the internalization of things, including multiple sub-cultures, such as corporate safety culture, integrity culture, lean culture and so on.

Lean culture as a concept and corporate culture are both related and different from each other, lean culture emphasizes efficiency, focus on saving, eliminate waste, while the corporate culture is more extensive, lean culture is included in the corporate culture, is an important part of the corporate culture, lean culture and corporate culture to achieve a better integration in order to achieve the effect of the culture on the promotion of the enterprise to enhance the level of management.

Lean culture, fine that is, fine, precise, benefit that is, benefits, benefits, reflecting the essence of the enterprise with limited resources to create maximized benefits. Advanced technology pursues efficiency, rigorous system pursues justice, and scientific culture pursues innovation. Enterprise management is not only a science, but more importantly a culture.

The construction of lean culture should start from believing the staff, believing that the staff can bring unexpected effect to the implementation of lean culture, believing that the staff can improve their quality through their efforts, believing that the staff can contribute to the development of the enterprise, and establishing a humanistic culture centered on “people”.

03

Problems in the integration of Lean and corporate culture

In the process of promoting the integration of lean and enterprise culture, many problems will be encountered, which are mainly reflected in the slow reflection of the guiding role, cohesive role, incentive role and constraint role of enterprise culture, and the lagging effect of the culture on the promotion of the enterprise to improve the management level. Therefore, the lean enterprise culture construction work faces many challenges.

1. In many of the enterprise projects that the author is responsible for, more employees understand Lean and think that “doing Lean” is “reducing people”, which makes the Lean project have some resistance at the beginning.

2. Employees have a clear understanding of the corporate culture they have formed, and through this understanding, they integrate the corporate culture into their actual work, which is the key to strengthening the corporate culture construction.

Generally speaking, the top management, the degree of cognition of the importance and necessity of enterprise culture is relatively deep and unified; middle management, although able to recognize the importance of enterprise culture, but uneven in the degree of cognition, especially in how to take the opportunity to enhance the cohesion of the masses of workers through the construction of enterprise culture is lacking; and the staff of the enterprise culture of the relatively shallow understanding of the enterprise culture, a general understanding of the spirit of the enterprise, Enterprise philosophy and other basic concepts, but through the enterprise culture to regulate behavior, improve the quality of the purpose, there is no particularly clear understanding.

3. That is, through the coordination of inter-departmental relations, to form the advantageous situation of smooth communication, rapid action, efficient and synergistic lean corporate culture.

04

The Key to Integrating Lean and Corporate Culture

Low-cost, high-efficiency lean management is undoubtedly the negation of high-cost, low-efficiency sloppy management, the core of the idea is to ensure the quality of products and services with less input costs, to create as much value as possible, and at the same time, close the relationship between the enterprise and the customer, according to the customer's demand for services to pull the product, to provide them with what they really need.

Therefore, “fine” should be reflected in the quality of service, that is, “zero accident”, “zero defect”, “zero error ”, the pursuit of “perfect”, “excellence”; “benefit” embodied in the cost and efficiency, that is, “zero waste”, only low cost. Zero waste”, only low cost to obtain high returns, therefore, lean thinking is not simply the pursuit of the lowest cost, the best quality in the eyes of the enterprise, but the pursuit of customers and enterprises are satisfied with the quality, the pursuit of cost and quality of the best configuration, the pursuit of product performance and price of the optimal ratio.

Lean thinking is used as a guide to deepen and construct a corporate culture that is compatible with it. Here, based on the experience of the responsible lean project, we put forward three key factors on how to effectively promote the construction of lean enterprise culture:

1. First of all, we should create and form a lean value that can be recognized by all employees, and establish “zero accident”, “zero defect” and “zero error” as the optimal ratio of cost and quality, and the optimal ratio of service and price. Establish “zero accident”, “zero defect”, “zero error” as the goal of cost and quality, optimal configuration, service and price optimal ratio.

Secondly, the incentive orientation should be correct, to do “the company's work” can not do “their own work”, to ensure that the company's revenue maximization. In the enterprise all departments and personnel are assessed, their income and their own positions and work performance related, so that everyone will be fully committed to their own work, but the relevance of personal work and the company's work is often ignored. In this way, although the company spends a lot of resources, but many resources are not able to play the role it should play.

Once again, mobilize the enthusiasm and initiative of every employee to form an all-employee improvement mechanism. Through the implementation of 5S, TPM, QCC and other related all-employee improvement activities, to enhance the company's employees' awareness of improvement, and all-employee improvement activities into the performance of the personal interests of the positive guidance, the formation of a positive, positive improvement atmosphere.

Finally, corporate culture is an intangible force, which is the soul of an enterprise. Among them, the injection of lean can make the soul more powerful and pure, but as a business manager must understand the essence of lean - “the pursuit of the best configuration of cost and quality”; otherwise, it will lose its soul, and will become a walking corpse, seemingly God away.

2. The construction of lean culture starts from believing employees. Lean production methods require top managers to fully trust their employees and train them. Improve their quality, increase their decision-making power, and build a “people”-centered humanistic culture.

First of all, to rely on employees, a high degree of trust in employees. Because of these wastes, need the gradual conversion of the staff's ideological concepts, work habits continue to change in order to realize.

Secondly, to continuously improve the quality of employees. Managers should become coaches, coordinators, supporters and service providers, responsible for training and development of employees, improve the overall quality of employees, so that employees have the ability to find a variety of waste phenomena in production and can analyze and solve the problem themselves.

Finally, it is necessary to fully authorize the employees and increase their decision-making scope. Problems in the production process, the staff can suspend production to attract the attention of departments at all levels to force them to solve these problems from the root.

As an advanced manufacturing system, Lean is a high degree of integration and unification of people, technology and business ideas within an enterprise. There is a wide range of intrinsic links between Lean and corporate philosophy.

The Lean approach itself is the result of “reverse thinking”. It will be a fundamental change in the strategic conception of the enterprise, and this change will be difficult. The cultivation of the entrepreneurial spirit and humanistic environment necessary for the implementation of Lean must be promoted and strengthened through the construction and implementation of the Lean corporate philosophy.

Lean is a systematic project that involves all aspects of the production activities of an enterprise, and requires great attention and participation of all employees. Through education and training, all employees should establish the concept that waste is the biggest “enemy”. Through education and training, employees at all levels should master the basic theories and methods of lean production.

To this end, all employees should be mobilized and advocated to learn new knowledge and theories, and employees from the management level to each position should establish a lean awareness and master the lean principles.

3. Learning and implementing lean only concept and awareness is not enough, there must also be some mandatory mechanism. In the lean production method, in order to realize just-in-time production, while ensuring unlimited approach to zero inventory, the production system itself should have a mandatory constraints on the quality of products and components, that is, forcing the production process of each process must produce products of qualified quality.

“Get it right once and for all”! All this requires managers and operators to follow the rules strictly and to innovate on the basis of compliance. Only by eliminating as much as possible the arbitrariness of personnel can we identify gaps between the enterprise's operating system and the market demand, and push the enterprise to make continuous improvements.

Define the core value of the enterprise, rationalize the value difference, and unify the management thought. In the process of system integration and process reengineering, form a common language and guideline for the enterprise oriented by lean values, improve operational efficiency, shape the overall image, enhance the core competitiveness of the lean enterprise, and lead the way in realizing the sustained and healthy growth of the enterprise's operating efficiency.

Guided by lean thinking and values, establishing a lean organization and realizing a flat structure through system integration and process reengineering is not only an important content of lean management, but also an important shift to realize the transition from linear thinking to systematic and creative thinking, which puts forward higher requirements for enterprise system innovation.

Therefore, the process of lean management is also the process of enterprise spirit and system innovation. Through the enterprise culture to enhance the quality of employees, the formation of a habitual concepts, measures and methods, the employees play a subtle influence and constraints.

05

Lean culture benefits the enterprise

By forming an excellent corporate culture, an enterprise can create a high-quality management team, thus forming the unique core competitiveness of the enterprise. The corporate culture extracted and formed from the practice of lean management can not only improve organizational efficiency through optimizing business and management processes, reduce operation and management costs, and enhance corporate competitiveness; at the same time, as an advanced corporate culture, it can be used to improve the efficiency of the organization, reduce operation and management costs, and enhance corporate competitiveness.

At the same time, as an advanced enterprise culture, it can shape a good overall image for the enterprise, improve its reputation and expand its influence. Further, it can be illustrated that enterprise culture is also a kind of productivity, which provides power and support for enterprises in economic development is lasting and powerful.

Enterprise culture will be the core competitiveness of the enterprise, which is the most important content of enterprise management. Through the injection of lean makes the enterprise has the lean culture, makes the enterprise has the stronger life vitality, has the real meaning of the symbol of personality, thus has the foundation of obtaining the survival, development and growth, and serves the whole society.

The lean management culture concept guided by lean concepts and ideas should not just be written in the documents, hung on the walls, left on the verbal slogans, but should be turned into a solid execution of all employees of the enterprise.

From thought to action, what is needed is the cultural self-consciousness of enterprise managers, this cultural self-consciousness, from the thinking of the ultimate goal of enterprise value and management, from the cultural connotation of enterprise management and cultural significance of the understanding of enterprise management, is the law of enterprise culture applied to the rational self-consciousness of enterprise management.

Enterprise culture is the soul of the enterprise, is to promote the development of the inexhaustible power of the enterprise, once the concepts and ideas contained in the lean and the integration of enterprise culture, will continue to promote the construction and innovation of enterprise culture, to provide fertile soil and inexhaustible source for the development of the enterprise.