The German government’s council of experts warns that the German economy will be overstretched. In addition to the positive effects associated with it, such as a reduction in unemployment, this growth can also become problematic. If orders cannot be executed due to bottlenecks, prices can increase and even inflation in the long term.

At first glance, the companies’ options seem limited. Nobody can ‘conjure up’ missing resources. However, experience from many years of cross-industry consulting practice shows that there is still a lot of untapped potential for improving processes and productivity.

• Entire departments are given tasks that are no longer needed after completion.
• Processes are so uncoordinated that after a single process recording with the employees concerned, the throughput time could be increased by 50% and productivity by as much as 35%.
• In service departments, the tasks and contact persons are not clearly assigned, which leads to regular chaos.
• A TSA (task structure analysis) in a service center showed that employees perform an average of 43 different tasks and do something different every 6 minutes.
• Executives and employees moan about email deluges, constant interruptions and unproductive meetings.

The examples could be continued, but they also show that some of the bottlenecks in the economy are home-made. Incidentally, the Fraunhofer Institute also regularly shows 1/3 of the working time as wasted. What could you not do with this time…

And this is where the lean management approach is ideal: the focus is on processes that have been defined and improved by the employees, clear descriptions of tasks and roles, and daily improvement in small steps.

The introduction of lean management is certainly not trivial at the beginning and the effort involved should not be underestimated. In the medium and long term, however, companies will have no other choice to cope with the increasing growth.