Lean means doing the most with what you have. It’s efficiency and intelligence. In the modern economy, lean is a fact of life. Management systems must absolutely be lean, or they will be abandoned as impractical dinosaurs. In the October 2003 issue of Quality Digest, we began exploring some of the fundamentals of a lean management system in “Don’t Think Small—Think Lean.” The article addressed lean processes for strategic planning, measurable objectives, business review, documentation and document control. Let’s continue our analysis of lean with some fundamental processes for driving the organization’s success: planning and forecasting, methods for capturing sales and lean techniques for gathering customer feedback.

Planning and forecasting

Work begins in most organizations with orders being booked or forecasted. In the perfect world, business organizations wouldn’t produce anything until there was confirmed demand for the good or service in question. After all, when organizations take a guess at future demand, they are often wrong. Being wrong means wasting resources. Too many wasted resources and you’re out of business.

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