Find out how ‘lean management’ can save you time and money

Improving efficiency and profitability in farming and growing businesses can be difficult, but ‘lean management’ techniques are increasingly being shown to help.

In fact, Farmers Weekly recently reported that one pig farming business saved £50,000 in its first year of using lean management techniques.

So, what exactly is lean management? The principle is based on the Japanese ‘Kaizen’ philosophy, which focuses on making small changes over time that work together to have a huge effect. 

Lean management expert Neil Fedden, who's been advising businesses for more than 15 years on how to make the most of the idea and is set to host our webinar on the subject, said: “With an increasing shortage of skills and rising costs, the need to focus on improvement has never been greater. Our webinar will focus on some simple and practical tips that people can start to use immediately.”

Tackling waste to grow profits

The key concepts of the approach are that it focuses on delivering more customer value, it minimises waste and builds a mindset in the business of continuous improvement.

With this in mind, all staff in the business are encouraged to identify the processes that add value and differentiate them from those that create waste. Doing this allows the team to recognise areas for improvement and identify ways to develop the business and its operations in the future.

Neil advises farmers and growers interested in lean management to start their journey with a ‘waste walk.’ To do this, you need to map out everything that happens on your farm, noting all the daily jobs and the typical processes involved before sketching out a scale drawing of the farm. 

With the list of tasks and the farm map outlined, you can then start to walk through the tasks on your map, and this is the first step in highlighting inefficiencies or areas where things could be better organised.

Identifying improvements in your own business

By getting a better feel for the flow of tasks around the site and the jobs that feature more waste, you can start to build a list of potential improvements. And Neil suggests using a prioritisation matrix to help identify the tasks which should be worked on first.

“By grading potential improvements according to how much of an impact they have and the ease of implementation, you can quickly identify those issues where a small amount of work can lead to a large improvement,” he said.

Neil Fedden explained more on the benefits of waste walks in our webinar, Management: time to get lean. You can watch the full recording and access our free resources on this topic by visiting our Management: time to get lean page.