Being Lean leads to us becoming more efficient

“Over the past 12 months I have gone from having no experience in Lean to becoming a Lean Advocate and attending an introduction to Six Sigma. If you’d of asked me 12 months ago what I thought of Lean I’d have suggested it was another managerial term which will be a passing fad, I no longer believe this.

In the last 12 months I have helped get us a Highways England Lean Maturity Assessment (HELMA) score to benchmark our performance against other contractors in the industry and devised an improvement plan to make sure we better our score next year. If we are successful in this I’m hoping we are actually using Lean tools far wider across the business this time next year.

What I like about Lean is the simplicity of it, using the tools that have been developed can have such a quick impact on a project whilst needing very little experience in Lean. Equally I like the premise of Lean, to reduce waste. Why would we not want to simplify what we do? This way, we can achieve more for less and focus on just doing the things that add value both to ourselves and our customers.

With Osborne focusing heavily on marginal gains, I feel Lean could be a tool to help us get there, we will be able to attribute savings and efficiencies in both time and money directly to operating in a Lean way. This won’t take drastic measures or time out of our days instead it is just reviewing the way we work and make sure we are focussing our efforts as a business on the steps that add value.
I look forward to learning more about Lean and seeing where we can take it as a business; I can only see it being a benefit to us all.”

Ben Wilcox is the Development Manager for Infrastructure at Osborne.