These days it is pretty much accepted that the service sector is different to manufacturing in certain fundamental ways and thus that Lean has needed to be reconsidered in the light of these differences.
Perhaps the most important difference is that in the service sector consumer demand cannot be easily anticipated / managed. My brother has a few beach cafes and when the sun comes out demand absolutely rockets. Other service organisations may not experience quite the same level of fluctuations in demand but most will experience massively higher levels of fluctuation than those organisations in the manufacturing sector, the heartland of traditional Lean.
What is less clear is whether the Lean community understands small and medium sized organisations (SME’s).
Most authors / thought leaders downplay or ignore any differences, whilst others seem to believe that SME’s have closer ties with their customers and that this magically means they are more Lean. I assume most medieval craftsmen would have had a very intimate knowledge of their clients but whether they were Lean is another thing all together!
So what are the fundamental differences?
Changes in the business environment effect both large and small alike. But SME’s are different in that their very survival relies on their business agility. In the beginning there is very little “business as usual” to pay the bills and thus a far greater need to vigorously chase opportunities even if they are completely outside the areas of business in which the organisation original expected to operate.
What does this mean for IT? And what would a Lean IT strategy look like for SME’s?
I believe it would be very different from the one I see when working with SME’s at this point in time. Currently you tend to find a mix of light weight tools (Excel / Word etc) from the start and later on a few software applications (Accounts packages / CRM etc) begin to become visible.
Unfortunately for any strategic approach to IT, as the organisation grows they rarely do so in a way that was anticipated. When software purchases are made they seem likely to fit the bill, but because of the need for radical changes of business direction just to survive, smaller organisations rarely seem to get the expected ROI from these early purchases.
What is even worse is that these systems rarely get jettisoned. One sees the beginnings of a problem that plagues larger organisations, the proliferation of IT systems that don’t really meet current needs, and yet that are too embedded in the organisation to be removed. The dreaded legacy system issue!
IT does not have to be this way. Simply put agility has to be valued over “best practice” and “efficiency”.
If you intend to grow quickly this is doubly true.
