The techniques of  Lean Manufacturing are applicable to most endeavors in many different fields. Since I was a high-level Lean Consultant for half a decade (working with some of this country's premiere defense contractors), I get asked about Lean practices from time to time. In this post, we'll use grocery shopping to illustrate some of these techniques.

Here's the most recent question I received: Can you give an example of how lean manufacturing principles and practices have improved an endeavor outside of manufacturing?

The easiest answer to this is, actually, out of the realm of manufacturing totally. Remember, the basis of Lean improvement is eliminating waste; wasted movement, wasted time, wasted materials, etc. In any process, there are numerous opportunities to get rid of waste that can be eliminated.

It's also important to recognize that some waste in any process cannot be eliminated. I'll have an example of that a little later.

When I started to be responsible for all the grocery shopping in my household, I set out to improve the experience. The first step was to establish the time (in lean this is determining tact time) it normally took to complete the weekly shopping trip; thus, a stopwatch was used to time the shopping trip. The clock started once I had my shopping cart ready to shop and ended when I finished checking out. Once I had a baseline time (averaging three subsequent trips shopping), I started my lean improvement campaign.

The first lean improvement was moving more quickly through the store, Perhaps spending less time deciding which size or brand to take home. How was that accomplished? First, I thought about it before I was in the store. The best tool here is a shopping list that listed exactly what brand or size item I wanted. So I wrote things down with a pencil on a pad as my shopping list.

What next? The grocery list was improved further by writing down acceptable replacements for items out of stock. I noted those potential replacements right next to each relevant item on the standard listings. This saved time hemming and hawing about replacements in the aisle at the grocery store. So, the excess time waste of looking around and hemming and hawing was largely eliminated.

What else could be done to improve the efficiency of the trips to the grocery store? Because, now, we need to start refining every aspect of the task to serve our needs!

The next improvement was to structure my shopping list based on the layout of the store instead of just randomly writing items on the list. This was really an efficiency breakthrough. It seems like it should have been easier to figure out sooner. What can I tell you? In my store, fresh vegetables and bread were in the first aisle and soda was in the last aisle. So soda was always at the bottom of the list. This was kind of a loose organization of the list; rudimentary.

This is where I started to implement standardized work; I started to list - in the order of placement in the store - the exact brand names (always the same) of the items needed and the brand names of the possible replacements.

This may sound a bit too much. Believe me, it became very necessary. When we got the point that our four girls were teenagers, each of them demanded a very special brand and style of sanitary products. Each request, per girl, was completely different from their sisters' requests. Substitutions were largely unacceptable. It’s not a very lean experience when you have to return something to the store!

How serious are you about making lean improvements in your operation or life? This next step might seem way out there. But, it really helped make another efficiency breakthrough. I took a camera into the store and photographed each aisle as I walked through the store. Then, I created a truly accurate map, on paper, that showed where each item was stocked in the store. This was used to refine my list building which now could be amazingly accurate in terms of product placement and order of purchase.

Now what would you do next? The answer involves using new technology breakthroughs. I’ll leave the next step up to your own imagination.

You must also remember that, sometimes, a lean strategy may be stymied by something beyond your control. In a factory, that may mean something like a monument that cannot be removed for some reason. When my team and I consulted with a rocket manufacturer, we came up against an immovable object; in the middle of the plant floor was a previous area in which they had produced a very successful kind of rocket in the past. The area had been designated by the United States as a historical landmark that absolutely could not be moved or eliminated. So we worked around it and accounted for it in our lean implementation plan.

Another time, it was discovered that electricity was arcing throughout the facility and threatened to make the rocket ships go BOOM. So, a lengthy time-out ensued.