--- title: "25 Lean Principles That Transformed Operational Efficiency in Unexpected Ways" url: "https://cooinsider.com/qa/25-lean-principles-that-transformed-operational-efficiency-in-unexpected-ways/" author: "COO Insider" published: "2026-09-18" updated: "2026-09-18" --- # 25 Lean Principles That Transformed Operational Efficiency in Unexpected Ways ## 25 Lean Principles That Transformed Operational Efficiency in Unexpected Ways Lean principles have delivered surprising efficiency gains across industries ranging from warehouse operations to content production and healthcare. This article gathers 25 real-world applications shared by practitioners who have applied lean methods to solve specific operational problems. Each example demonstrates a practical technique that reduced waste, accelerated workflows, or prevented costly errors. ### Expose Hidden Constraints With Single-Piece Flow The lean principle that changed things for us in a way I didn't expect was single-piece flow, normally talked about on a factory line, but we applied it to our robotics writing operation and it exposed a bottleneck we'd been ignoring for months. We used to batch orders, run a hundred notes through one machine setup before switching to the next batch, which felt efficient on paper. Once we switched to processing orders in smaller batches that moved through the whole pipeline faster, we found our actual constraint wasn't the writing machines at all; it was the quality check step sitting idle between batches waiting for volume to pile up. Batching had been hiding that problem the whole time. Implementation was messy, honestly. We had operators used to the batch rhythm, and it took a few weeks of resistance before the smaller flow felt normal. But once it clicked, our fulfillment time dropped roughly 30%, and just as important, we caught defects the same day instead of finding a bad batch of a hundred notes two days later. The unexpected part wasn't the speed gain; it was that batching had been masking where our real bottleneck lived. You don't find your true constraint until you stop protecting it with inventory or work sitting in queue. Small batches force the truth out faster than any dashboard will. *— [Rick Elmore](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-elmore), CEO, Simply Noted* --- ### Fix Root Causes Behind Repeat Questions The lean principle that produced an unexpected gain was treating recurring questions as process defects. We first believed these questions were only communication issues within the team. We realized the process was making people search for basic information every day. That simple shift changed how we viewed daily work. We tracked repeated questions over several weeks and fixed the causes instead of answering them faster. We standardized project names, kept one shared status source, and added clear decision notes. We gave everyone the same place to find updates and confirm ownership. As a result, meetings became clearer, and team leads spent more time solving decisions together instead of explaining old updates repeatedly. *— [Vaibhav Kakkar](https://www.linkedin.com/in/%F0%9F%8F%86-vaibhav-kakkar-494b0b3), Founder and Group CEO, Digital Web Solutions* --- ### Map Reality Before You Optimize Map before you optimize! Before I touch anything in a client's operation, I document reality as it runs right now. The way it actually runs, including the workarounds nobody talks about, step by step, person by person, decision by decision. One client had an e-commerce operation shipping to 27 EU countries. Their team spent 25 to 40 minutes per order on customs documentation because one person had to manually decide which form to use for every single shipment. Nobody questioned it because "that is just how we did it in the past decade." When I mapped it, the pattern was obvious: 90% of the decisions followed the same logic. Destination, value threshold, product type. Three variables. The Documentation Manager was making the same decision hundreds of times a day, just with different inputs, then hit print. The fix was a decision framework built directly into their workflow. The system selects the correct form automatically. The Documentation Manager only reviews exceptions. Time per order dropped from 35 minutes to under 2 minutes. Just a clearer picture of what was already happening and one structural change. The lean principle is you cannot improve what you have not seen. And most operations have never been properly seen. Founders build their business on instinct, hire people into undefined roles, and create processes by accident. The first real map of their operation is usually the most valuable deliverable I produce. Measure reality first. Then decide what to change. *— [Mira Eszter Kőmíves](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mira-kme/), CEO, Multilingual Virtual Miracles* --- ### Cap Work to Finish Faster The lean principle everyone quotes is "eliminate waste," and most people run at that with scissors, cutting steps and costs. Useful, sure. But the one that actually transformed things for us was subtler and honestly counterintuitive: limit how much work is in progress at once. Not how much you do — how much you have open and unfinished at any given moment. Here's the part that surprised me. I always assumed the way to move faster was to start more things. More projects in flight, more ground covered. What lean taught me is the opposite: every unfinished thing is a tax. It sits there half-done, taking up mental space, needing status updates, getting stale, waiting on someone. A pile of things that are 80% done delivers exactly zero value, because nobody can use 80% of anything. So we made a rule that felt wrong at first: finish before you start. Cap the number of things in progress, and don't pick up the shiny new thing until something actually ships. The unexpected result wasn't just faster delivery. It was that the constant low-grade anxiety of "everything's kind of in motion and nothing's done" just... lifted. People could see things complete. Morale climbed for a reason I never would've predicted from a productivity tweak. The trap is that starting something feels like progress. It isn't. Finishing is progress. Everything between start and finish is just risk wearing a costume. *— [Derek Wild](https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekwild), CEO & Founder, Listening.com* --- ### Question Every Step Before Automation I'm Max Shak, Founder and CEO of NerDAI.com. One lean principle that has had a surprisingly big impact on how I think about efficiency is simple: eliminate the work that doesn't need to exist before trying to make the remaining work faster. It sounds obvious, but businesses often do the opposite. They automate a process, hire someone to manage it, or add another software tool without first asking whether the underlying step is actually necessary. I started paying much closer attention to this when working across different projects and seeing how easily small administrative tasks multiplied. A five-minute approval here, a duplicate spreadsheet there, another status meeting to discuss information that already existed somewhere else. None of these tasks seemed significant individually, but collectively they consumed a meaningful amount of productive time. My approach became to map a process from beginning to end and ask one question at every step: "If we removed this step completely, what would actually break?" If the answer was "nothing important," we removed it. If it was necessary, we looked for ways to simplify or automate it. The unexpected benefit was that efficiency improved without requiring the team to work faster. In one workflow, we reduced the number of handoffs and approval points by roughly a third. That shortened turnaround time by about 30% and, just as importantly, reduced the number of errors caused by information being copied between systems. That experience reinforced something I now look for constantly: efficiency isn't always about doing more with less. Sometimes it's about realizing you were doing things that never needed to be done in the first place. For me, lean thinking works best when it becomes a habit of questioning processes rather than a one-time cost-cutting exercise. Before asking, "How can we optimize this?" I ask, "Why are we doing this at all?" *— [Max Shak](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mojtaba-shakiba-74002263), Founder/CEO, nerD AI* --- ### Empower Pickers to Stop Mistakes We accidentally discovered that moving slower made us faster. Sounds backwards, right? When we hit about $6M in revenue at my fulfillment company, I was obsessed with pick rate. Our warehouse team was flying through orders, hitting 150+ picks per hour. We were crushing industry benchmarks. But our error rate sat at 2.3 percent, which meant we were shipping roughly 1,400 wrong items every month. The cost of fixing those mistakes was eating our margins alive. I implemented what Toyota calls "jidoka" without even knowing the term at the time. We gave every picker the authority to stop the line if something felt off. A SKU looked different than usual? Stop and verify. Box weight seemed wrong? Stop and recheck. My warehouse manager thought I'd lost my mind. He kept saying we'd kill our throughput numbers. First month, our pick rate dropped to 118 per hour. I was sweating bullets. But errors fell to 0.7 percent. By month three, something wild happened. Pickers got so good at catching issues early that they sped back up to 142 picks per hour while holding errors at 0.6 percent. We'd trained their eyes to work smarter. The financial impact shocked me. We cut customer service hours spent on order issues by 61 percent. Reshipping costs dropped $18,000 monthly. But the real win was retention. Brands stopped leaving us because we'd become the most accurate option they'd ever used, even if we weren't always the cheapest. The principle that stuck with me: speed is worthless if you're sprinting in the wrong direction. I see brands make this mistake constantly when choosing 3PLs. They optimize for same-day processing without asking about accuracy rates. Then they wonder why customers are furious and returns skyrocket. Build quality into the process, and speed follows naturally. Rush quality out of the process, and you'll spend all your time fixing what you broke. *— [Joe Spisak](https://www.linkedin.com/in/spisakjoe), CEO, Fulfill.com* --- ### Automate Rental Operations to Eliminate Waste Waste elimination through standardized work transformed our operational efficiency. We leveraged lean concepts to create working automation to support the people who operate our distributed short-term rental client portfolio. This includes automated cleaning schedules, inventory restocking, maintenance coordination, dynamic pricing, and owner reporting. These and other standard, automated workflows also streamline guest processes to deliver short-term rental experiences across our distributed properties. These changes have helped us support more than 10,000 stays and deliver more than $12 million in revenue for short-term rental clients across 25 states. *— [Chad Phillis](https://www.linkedin.com/in/chad-phillis-49211810a), Founder & CEO, Checkmate Rentals* --- ### Improve Handoffs and Remove Unneeded Tasks A principle that we really focused on last year specifically was improving flow. When it comes to lean and efficient operations, it helps to create better flow between all of the different steps so that your team isn't constantly having to wait to move to the next thing after completing something else, so that was our focus. We spent a couple of months actually just really looking at how we could improve flow and testing out different proposed strategies. It was a team effort, so we implemented a lot of different opinions from our employees, which ended up being incredibly helpful. By the end of that time period, one of the unexpected benefits we gained was actually discovering a few steps that could be eliminated altogether. We found a few areas where by improving the flow from one step to another, an entire task we had been previously doing became unnecessary, and by getting rid of those few things (in addition to improving general flow), our operations sped up notably. *— [David Joles](https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidjoles5863), Chief Operating Officer, PURCOR Pest Solutions* --- ### Trace Digital Data to Cut Lead Times Value Stream Mapping's most transformative power lies in mapping information inventory between departments long before a single line of software is configured. While typically viewed as a shop-floor tool, the most persistent bottlenecks in modern manufacturing and distribution are rarely machine speeds, but rather the administrative wait times where data sits in digital buffers like unread emails or siloed spreadsheets. By treating a sales order or procurement request as a physical part moving through a factory, organizations can expose the hidden waste within a digital lifecycle. In several large-scale ERP implementations, I have required teams to physically trace the journey of a single order through every department before beginning technical configuration. This process frequently reveals that a significant portion of total lead time is spent on manual data re-entry and redundant validation. For example, when mapping the stream from procurement to production, we discovered that nearly one-third of the cycle time was lost to verifying inventory levels that were already recorded in a separate system. Identifying these digital waste points allowed us to configure the ERP to eliminate manual hand-offs and automate status triggers. The measurable result of this approach is a significant reduction in the order-to-cash cycle, often cutting administrative lead times by 20% to 30%. More importantly, it bridges the gap between the operations director and the IT director by forcing a consensus on the workflow before the software is deployed. Treating data flow as a value stream ensures the resulting digital system supports the business process rather than just automating existing inefficiencies. Success in enterprise software is ultimately a matter of operational alignment, not the configuration itself. *— [Girish Songirkar](https://www.linkedin.com/in/girishsongirkar), Delivery Manager, Enterprise Software Engineering, Arionerp* --- ### Publish Early, Triple Content Output Running lean with one marketing person taught me that speed beats perfection almost every time. I used to have him polish blog posts for days before anything went live, and that habit quietly drained our output. We were putting out maybe two pieces a month. I changed the rule to this: draft fast, publish within 48 hours, and fix anything minor after it's live. That felt uncomfortable at first, since neither of us wanted typos or rough edges going out to clients. But once we accepted that done matters more than flawless, our output tripled within two months. We went from two posts a month to six, and none of the extra volume hurt quality in any way that clients noticed. If anything, firms started referencing our blog in sales calls more often, simply because there was more of it to find and share. *— [Nikhil Pai](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilpi), Founder, Chronicle Technologies* --- ### Consolidate Tools to Boost Team Efficiency One of the lean principles we applied to our operation was a focus on maximizing our use of fewer, more general-purpose software tools wherever possible. I was sure that this would come with some sacrifices in terms of workflow, efficiency, or compatibility, but those simply haven't materialized. Instead, the longer we kept using the same platforms, the better our teams got at maximizing their features and value. This has turned what I thought would be a budgetary sacrifice into a genuine win for our team's speed and efficiency. *— [Ranjith Raghunath](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ranjith-raghunath), CEO, CX Data Labs* --- ### Size Buffers for Demand Volatility The lean principle that changed most for me was the one I had been applying backwards: buffer sizing. Standard lean reads buffers as waste to be minimized. What worked was sizing the buffer to volatility rather than to the average—variable demand gets more cover, stable demand gets less. Total inventory fell about 15% while stockouts fell too, which shouldn't happen if buffers are simply waste. They aren't waste; they're purchased optionality. You're not paying to be right about demand; you're paying to survive being wrong. I call it Volatility-Sized Buffers. *— [Colin Reed](https://www.linkedin.com/in/creed52), Independent Consultant, Modern Wealth Model* --- ### Standardize Dispatch Questions to Prevent Missteps The lean principle that helped us most was eliminating preventable rework. We standardised the questions asked before dispatch: exact location, vehicle type and condition, clearance or access restrictions, and destination. This is particularly important for underground car parks, where sending a conventional truck to a 1.8-metre clearance wastes time for both the operator and customer. We measure the result through call-to-dispatch time and the number of jobs requiring follow-up clarification. Both improved because operators could make the correct equipment and recovery decision from the initial call. The unexpected benefit was calmer communication with stranded customers because fewer details had to be revisited. *— [Joshua Harrison](https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-harrison-582874419), Founder, Underground Towing & Salvage* --- ### Prune Backlogs to Accelerate Releases Ruthless backlog pruning changed more than I expected. We had a product backlog at Pageloot that had grown to somewhere around 200 items over three years. Feature requests, bug reports, half-baked ideas from team calls, all living in the same list with the same theoretical priority. Nobody trusted it. Developers would ignore it and pull work from Slack instead, which meant the backlog kept growing while actual decisions happened in a different channel entirely. The fix was brutal: we killed anything older than 90 days that hadn't been brought up in a meeting or touched by a real user complaint. Cut the list from roughly 200 items to 31 overnight. Then we capped it permanently: nothing enters unless something exits. The result wasn't what I anticipated. I expected faster sprints. What actually happened was fewer context switches. Developers stopped asking, "Why are we building this?" because every item on the list had been recently validated. Onboarding a new developer dropped from about three weeks to nine days because the system made sense to an outsider. The measurable part: our release cadence went from roughly one meaningful feature per six weeks to one every 17 days, tracked over the following quarter. Lean's core idea, stop starting and start finishing, sounds obvious until you see how much invisible drag a bloated backlog creates on team attention, not just team time. *— [Siim Kostabi](https://www.linkedin.com/in/siim-kostabi), CEO, Pageloot* --- ### Connect Clients Directly With Builders The one that changed the most for us was removing handoffs. In lean terms, it is flow, and in agency terms, it meant deleting the account manager role entirely. Every handoff between a client and the person doing the work adds a translation step, and every translation step adds both delay and error. A request that passes through a project manager loses the tone, the urgency and often the real reason behind it. Then it comes back the same way. We put clients directly in touch with the small team that designs and builds their site, seven days a week. The unexpected result was not just speed. It was that the number of revision rounds dropped, because the person building the page understood what was actually being asked the first time. The measurable side is that changes go live the same day and landing pages ship in twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The trade-off is real and worth naming, because it only works while the team is small enough that everyone can hold the context themselves. *— [Attila Vaszka](https://www.linkedin.com/in/attilavaszka), Co-founder, Quarter Digital* --- ### Authorize Rapid Campaign Pauses One lean principle that had an unexpectedly large effect for us was “stop the line,” the idea from manufacturing that any worker can halt production the moment they spot a defect, rather than letting it pass downstream to be caught later. We adapted this to campaign management, giving account managers explicit authority to pause any live campaign immediately if something looked off—a spend spike, an odd conversion pattern—without needing approval first. Before this, flagged issues would often sit in a queue until a scheduled review because pausing something felt like it needed sign-off. Implementing it meant removing a step, not adding one. We explicitly told the team pausing a campaign was never going to be treated as a mistake, even if the flagged issue turned out to be nothing. The cost of a false alarm was a few minutes of review, while the cost of letting a real issue run undetected for days was actual wasted budget. That permission shift was the entire implementation: no new tooling, just removing the hesitation to act. The measurable result was a meaningful drop in average time-to-catch for budget-related issues. Problems that used to sit for a few days until a scheduled review now typically got caught and paused within hours. The unexpected part was how much of our previous inefficiency wasn't a tooling or detection problem at all; it was a permission problem. People were noticing issues just as quickly as before; they just weren't empowered to act on it immediately, and removing that one bottleneck had a bigger impact than any process or tooling change we made separately. *— [Ankita Pathak](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ankita-pathak-648208192), Founder, OneMetrik* --- ### Gate AI Briefs Before Failure TKEG Expat is a corporate-services firm that manages 120 companies across 22 jurisdictions, and one lean principle that changed our content operations in an unexpected way is jidoka, Toyota's practice of stopping the line the moment a defect is detected so nothing defective flows downstream. We applied it to the AI pipeline that has written 208 of the 209 SEO content briefs on our keyword records. Because a wrong keyword or brand name should never travel further down the line, we built a gate that every brief has to pass, which today runs 17 checks plus a re-check against the live keyword record when the brief is generated. However, our first live pilot failed 5 of 10 records, all on how strictly the gate matched the example keywords, so we let those checks ignore case and extra spaces but kept the header check exact, and the rerun passed 10/10. The gate still can not catch a keyword renamed after the brief is published, and it does not check internal links. Moreover, even more important for us, the rules of the gate moved into the step in front of it. That is, jidoka is meant to build in quality at each process, so the same rules should also sit in the prompt that writes the brief. Our first wave of 121 briefs needed a repair round on 28 records, and after we copied the verbatim-keyword and brand rules into the writing prompts, the second wave of 47 passed with zero failures. *— [KEITH YUNXI ZHU](https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithyzhu), Chief Executive, TKEG Expat INC* --- ### Replace Kanban Cards With Labeled Bins The principle was a simple one: a signal that can be lost will be lost. I designed and deployed a three-bin Kanban replenishment system across twelve assembly lines and roughly 18,600 SKUs at a manufacturing plant. Within two months of the pilot, operators had lost between 400 and 500 Kanban cards—and every lost card was a silent, broken replenishment signal that eventually became a line stoppage. The expected fix was more discipline: audits, retraining, laminated cards. Instead, I eliminated the card entirely and made the permanently labeled bin itself the signal. An empty bin at the collection point was the replenishment trigger—nothing to lose, nothing to forget. Monthly downtime from material shortages fell 89%, from roughly 56 hours to 6, worth close to two hundred thousand dollars annually. The unexpected lesson: the best way to enforce a standard is to design the failure mode out of existence rather than manage it with vigilance. *— [Sai Prasad Ravulapally](https://www.linkedin.com/in/saiprasadravulapally), Continuous Improvement Manager* --- ### Refine Skincare Plans Through Continuous Improvement Implementing a principle of continuous improvement, borrowed from lean methodologies, has profoundly impacted how I approach skincare treatment plans and client education. By treating each consultation and treatment cycle as an iterative process, rather than a one-time solution, I've been able to tailor more effective, long-term regimens while enhancing client satisfaction. For example, when addressing chronic inflammation due to a compromised skin barrier, I incorporate data-driven assessments at intervals, such as structured follow-ups focused on hydration retention outcomes and post-inflammatory pigmentation reduction percentages. Using this evolving data, I refine treatment protocols, adjusting active ingredients or introducing supplemental treatments like LED therapy or lasers only when they align with the skin's recovery trajectory. This prevents overloading the skin and avoids setbacks commonly seen with overly aggressive protocols. What solidifies my approach is a background deeply rooted in medical aesthetics and evidence-based skincare, spanning years of expertise in ingredient science and advanced technologies like fractional lasers. I've witnessed firsthand how iterative strategies lower adverse reactions and boost measurable treatment success, including a 40% increase in client retention within one year when post-treatment education became a part of every follow-up. To implement this in practice, skincare professionals can systematically evaluate outcomes, such as barrier integrity tests or moisture balance scales, and use these insights to educate clients about the "why" behind recommendations. This process not only builds trust but empowers clients to actively participate in protecting their skin health, fostering both compliance and long-term results. *— [Katelyn Fitzgerald](https://www.linkedin.com/in/katelynure), Founder & CEO, Luminous Skin Lab* --- ### Assign One Coordinator From Call to Admission What surprised me most was single-piece flow because I always thought it was a manufacturing thing, not a behavioral health thing. Single-piece flow was the lean concept that had the biggest impact on us, and both moved in the right direction. Hand-offs in treatment are not neutral. For example, someone comes into the call center. You ask them to tell the worst story of their lives to a stranger, and most of them stop telling it. So we've stopped queuing people. One coordinator now owns a case from the first call through the moment they walk in the door. The coordinator now handles the insurance work they used to hand off. I'm doing it the boring way. So I sat in the admissions office, I timed it for two weeks, so I wrote on the whiteboard, and we actually discovered that it wasn't the clinical assessment, it was the time in between people. We kept the data on the time between contact and admission and the number of people who fell off between assessment and admission. The fall-off number moved more. It's not a cost line. Waiting time is the point where someone changes their mind, and we built it the boring way. *— [Michael Schaub](https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-schaub-mha), CEO, Aura Recovery Center* --- ### Block Irreversible Errors With Poka-Yoke Poka-yoke—mistake-proofing—and the unexpected part was that it made us faster, not safer-but-slower. I run Meow Universe, a network of roughly ninety small publishing sites, where most of the build work is automated. Our failures were never dramatic. They were routine operations done correctly against the wrong target: a deletion run in the wrong place, a config change published to a path nobody was reading anymore, two automated processes editing the same file forty minutes apart so the second silently overwrote the first. Every one of them was preventable by remembering something. So the fix always looked like a checklist, and the checklist always worked until the week we were busy. What changed things was moving the check out of memory and into the mechanism. Destructive operations can no longer be run ad hoc at all—a deletion has to reference a specific pre-approved decision, so the dangerous shortcut is not available even to someone in a hurry. In the same spirit, verification can stop a release rather than merely warn about it: our publishing pipeline has been blocked several releases in a row by its own contract checks, and every one of those blocks was a genuine defect that would otherwise have gone live. Two implementation notes. First, put the gate only on irreversible operations. We deliberately left everything reversible completely ungated, which is why throughput did not suffer. Second, the gate has to be the only path, not the recommended path. A guardrail you can step around is documentation, not poka-yoke. On results, I would rather be precise than impressive: I do not have benchmarked before-and-after productivity figures. What I can say concretely is that the specific failure classes the gates cover stopped recurring, and that defects now surface as a blocked release rather than as a live mistake found later—which is much cheaper, because rolling back a publish costs far more than not publishing. Limitations: this is a small operation's own experience, not client work or industry benchmarks. MING-YUAN XIE, Founder, Meow Universe. *— [MING-YUAN XIE](https://www.linkedin.com/in/xmy1983), Serial Entrepreneur & Founder of Meow Universe, Meow Universe* --- ### Develop Products One at a Time Single-piece flow is what changed my operation, and it showed up in the least glamorous place possible: how I develop a new product. I used to batch. Sketch six product ideas, then source six at once, then order samples for all six, then evaluate all six. It felt efficient because every stage moved a full set forward. What it did was hide problems. If a dispensing issue turned up on the fourth sample, I had already committed time and tooling attention to five others carrying the same flaw. So I started running one product all the way through before starting the next. One idea, one sample, one test in a real household, one decision. If it fails, it fails alone and cheap. If it passes, everything I learned goes straight into the next one instead of sitting in a queue waiting for the batch to catch up. The result I care about is rework. Fewer sample rounds per product, fewer packaging revisions after commitment, and a shorter gap between deciding something works and having it ready to sell. My cash also stops sitting in five half-finished ideas at once. The part I did not expect was how much clearer my judgment got. When only one thing is moving, I see what is wrong with it. *— [Roy Peer](https://linkedin.com/in/roypeer), Founder, Clean Guy* --- ### Limit Assortment to Simplify Support The lean move was capping the shop at 28 products across four brands, instead of stocking full ranges because a distributor waved a catalogue. Implementation was the edit itself: The Doux, SheaMoisture, Oyin Handmade and Kitsch only, and anything that did not earn a reorder or a clear inbox job left the site. The measurable result is fewer SKUs to explain and a support desk that can still answer inside one working day. Waste was the jar that sat because we were afraid to cut it. Efficiency showed up as a shelf a 3B customer can finish, not a warehouse of almosts. *— [Emma Rusby](https://www.linkedin.com/in/emma-rusby), Director, Zenvy Beauty* --- ### Standardize Procedures to Reduce Redo Work Standardization is one of the lean principles that has changed my thinking on how to be more efficient in my operations. When I was managing several early learning centres, I was expecting to get a lot of efficiency by getting people to work faster, but I discovered that having consistent processes had a much greater impact. I began to examine how teams were doing the same thing differently, and then collaborated with managers to develop more consistent procedures, checklists, expectations, and still leave room for professional judgment. This reflects a fundamental lean principle of finding unnecessary variation and eliminating it and improving the flow of work, not just getting people to work harder. Lean operations research has also demonstrated that process reorganisation around flow can lead to a decrease in work in progress and an increase in output. What I found most surprising was that our campuses were not less flexible because of the standardization, but more flexible because of it, in that it freed up our leaders to be more capable of attending to problems that needed their attention. I monitored operational problems before and after the implementation of more consistent processes, including repetitive administrative tasks, delays, and manager corrections/repetitions. The most significant measurable improvement was the decrease in unnecessary rework and the consistency of the campuses. *— [Melanie Excell](https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanie-excell), Operations Manager | Children’s Rights Queensland Ambassador, Little Scholars School of Early Learning* --- ### Reveal Waiting to Stabilize Requests The most surprising lean principle was making waiting visible. Every request was tracked through active work and quiet periods between updates. That revealed hidden delays caused by missing information, approvals, or handoffs. Instead of treating silence as normal, each pause became a clear signal. Every delay received a simple reason and a matching response, such as clarification, scheduling, or closure. This created steadier workflows and more predictable completion across everyday tasks. Teams spent less time chasing updates because expectations were clearer and requests moved with better consistency across shared responsibilities every day. Making waiting visible encouraged honest communication, reduced confusion, and helped every team member understand progress with greater confidence together daily. *— [Brian Lebeau](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-lebeau-b7773a1), CEO, Attic Projects Company* --- ### Related Articles - [18 Approaches for Identifying and Eliminating Operational Waste: Impact Measurement and Surprising Outcomes](https://cooinsider.com/qa/18-approaches-for-identifying-and-eliminating-operational-waste-impact-measurement-and-surprising-outcomes) - [25 Process Optimization Techniques That Delivered Unexpected Results"](https://cooinsider.com/qa/25-process-optimization-techniques-that-delivered-unexpected-results) - [25 Operational Efficiency Improvements with the Highest ROI for Small Businesses](https://cooinsider.com/qa/25-operational-efficiency-improvements-with-the-highest-roi-for-small-businesses)