Lean Philosophy and Design Thinking: A Combined Approach

Abstract

Lean Manufacturing philosophy is being adopted worldwide as most industries aim at improving efficiency in their production processes through waste reduction or elimination, as for their goal is to increase market competitiveness and resilience to disruptive factors. Yet, implementing Lean Manufacturing philosophy is not a straightforward process and an increasing number of studies report many flaws, by several reasons, during the implementation process. These flaws may certainly have a quite significant negative impact on the performance of industries, sometimes with dramatic consequences. This work aims to explore how Lean Manufacturing philosophy combined with Design Thinking methodology can became a successful combined approach to overcome reported critical failure factors in the implementation of lean tools in industrial environments. Both methodologies are significantly different in nature, but we show how they can be combined for a successful implementation of lean tools. A particular key factor for this success is to take advantage of Design Thinking as a human-centric approach to solve “wicked” problems. In the end, we present a dictionary between DMAIC methodology for improving existing process problems with unknown causes, and the stages of Design Thinking methodology.