Ignore the naysayers who say lean only applies to manufacturing. Ignore, as well, the ones who take it even further, saying lean applies only to high-volume manufacturing. They’re simply wrong.

So say the hosts of Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement in the second of their podcast series exploring myths surrounding lean and Six Sigma. In this episode Dr. Mohamed Saleh and John Dyer explore and debunk the myth that lean applies only to manufacturing, and devote time to Six Sigma toward the end of the episode.

Saleh counts himself as one of those individuals who initially believed in the myth. He started his career in manufacturing and when initially approached to take his experience into health care, “I couldn't fathom or see how [lean] would be applied to healthcare. We don't make widgets.”

Since then, Saleh has worked in multiple industries, and his perspective has completely changed.

“Shigeo Shingo said it best when he said it doesn't matter if you're making bread or making automobiles, waste is waste regardless of where you see it, and the guiding principles don't change,” he says. “…in the absence of understanding the guiding principles, you tend to sometimes look at the tools, and unfortunately could make statements … where you say I'm … low volume, high mix, and it doesn't apply to us.”

“It does apply to you,” Saleh asserts. It’s simply that lean will need to be customized or tailored to your industry or your environment, he says.

In this episode, Dyer shares a compelling example of lean in a fire department. He discusses a process map that showed how the department already had shaved immense waste in the process from the time a call came in to the time the fire truck left the station.

“Talk about a repeatable process. They knew exactly where all their equipment was, how to engage that equipment, how to get … all of the firefighters on the truck all at the same time,” Dyer says.

Dyer gave the team their kudos and then asked them to think about the next part of the process, from when the fire engine leaves the station to its arrival at the emergency. Technically, that part of the process is transportation, thus non-value-added waste despite its necessity if the firefighters are simply sitting there doing nothing during the ride, Dyer pointed out.

Dyer said he got some pushback initially, but it started the firefighters thinking about what they could do to turn that transportation time into something that added value. Their thoughts turned to drone technology, which was just being introduced at the time, and a host of ideas emerged.

For example, said Dyer, they discussed launching a drone to the site of the emergency as soon as a call comes in, given that it can arrive on scene more quickly than a truck. Then, “We could have someone on the truck with a laptop getting a feed from that camera, and they could be communicating to their teammates … where the fire hydrant is, and how many cars are blocking the path, or how many pedestrians there are around, or where's the smoke coming out of the building, and are there people screaming for help?”

Saleh also shared several examples of taking lean into industries outside of manufacturing. He spoke of taking SMED into health care, for instance. SMED, or single-minute exchange of die, is a very manufacturing specific tool, he pointed out. However, the underlying principle behind doing quick changeovers can be as relevant to the operating room as it is to the shop floor.

And while he has seen lean successfully applied across many industries, Saleh offered a caution.

“If you're trying to take the way you have applied [lean] in your industry and copy exactly to another industry, you are going to struggle,” he says. “You have to be innovative in the way you apply it because the variations do change the tools. They don't change the principles.”

The duo concluded the episode with a quick discussion of Six Sigma, highlighting the importance of understanding variation and control charts in non-manufacturing settings.