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Exploration of Lean Principals in Higher Educational Institutes – Based on Degree of Implementation and Indigence

Parminder Singh Kang, Lawrence Mukhongo Manyonge

Abstract— Increased competition and scarcity of resources in global markets has augmented the problems for manufacturing industry, which has forced organizations to adopt new tools and techniques in order to find the proactive solutions. In Past, manufacturing industry has exemplified that the key to survive in highly competitive and rapidly changing environments is to implement the more effective, proactive and long term solutions to a problem. Similar to the manufacturing organizations, higher educational institutes are facing similar challenges such as increased competitions, higher quality of service at competitive cost and variability in customer demand in terms of requested services. In fact, in terms of problem landscape, associated problem variables and goals for higher educational institutes are similar as of manufacturing industries. The only difference is the way these are interpreted and represented. Lean principles and waste used by the manufacturing organizations are used as basic building block for this research. The main objective of this paper is to illustrate the waste in higher educational institutes with respect to the three fundamental elements i.e. Students, Research and Staff. This can provide the basic framework for other process improvement implementations in higher educational institutes. Along this, the other most important aspect is the indigence to implement Lean based approaches and up to what extent as well as effectiveness of implementation in terms of invested time, resources and money. The scope of this paper is limited to interpret the waste in higher educational institutes, which can act as basic framework for other process improvements in the educational industry. This is step forward to implement Lean based structure to the higher educational institutes in order to maximize the revenue, throughput and customer satisfaction with high quality products and minimize the cost and waste, which one of the objective of any organization.

Index Terms— Continuous Process Improvement, Problem Solving, Process Waste, Lean Manufacturing, Higher Educational Institutes.

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1 INTRODUCTION

Manufacturing organizations have learnt a tough lesson by going through a number of industrial revolutions, i.e. from craft production system to mass production
system and then Toyota production system to Lean manufac- turing. Lean manufacturing philosophy has enabled organiza- tion to deal with high level of product customization at small- er quantities. There are numerous examples of Lean tools and techniques have been applied for process improvement across the manufacturing organizations, such as automobile manu- facturers, Steel manufacturing, pharmaceutical manufacturer of drugs and low cost based manufacturing industries, Elec- tronics Manufacturing etc. [1, 2, 3 and 4]. This is not only the manufacturing industries however, which have benefited from the Lean philosophy, Lean tools and techniques have been used successfully in the service industry such as healthcare, process based industries, office environment, soft- ware development, public services, Law enforcement, banking and finance, aerospace and military etc. At the same time, Lean tools and techniques have been integrated with ad- vanced simulation, artificial intelligence, evolutionary algo- rithms (EA), etc to address manufacturing problems and pro- cess improvement issues [5, 6, 7 and 8]. For instance, Lean and

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• Dr. Parminder Singh Kang, Contact Details: Lean Engineering Research group, Faculty of Technology, De Montfort University, Leicester, LE1 9BH, UK, PH-

0044 116 207 8089, E-mail: pkang@dmu.ac.uk

• Dr. Lawrence Mukhnongo Manyonge, Contact Details: Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,Technical University of Monbasa, P.O. Box 90420 -

80100, Mombasa, Kenya, E-mail: mukhongo@tum.ac.ke

simulation modeling being used in the healthcare for process improvement and evaluation of existing procedures such as to eliminate the duplicate process and procedures to improve the quality of service by reducing the lead time in terms of record- ing the patient details, moving patients, waiting for doctors and consultants, etc [9]. Similarly, Lean philosophy has been successfully applied to the software development process for instance, by implementing Lean; eBay reduced all the unnec- essary steps from the trading chain where software capabili- ties were developed based on daily customer needs, Digital River provided sophisticated and customized graphical user interface and database solutions in the period of weeks, Mi- crosoft’s lean based corporate wide strategy implemented across financial, human resource and purchasing departments using the data warehouses, etc [10 and 11]. In these examples, the focus remained to address the need of rapid response to complex and specific customer requirements with reduced cost and improved productivity of software development pro- cess. [12] has also applied Lean thinking to information man- agement by focusing on the key information management ac- tivities i.e. how information is organized, visualized and rep- resented and most importantly enabling information to flow to the end-user through the processes of exchange, sharing and collaboration. Lean implementations across different sec- tors have shown enormous benefits in terms of labor and productivity improvement (45-75%), cost saving (25-55%), space reduced (35-50%), inventory reduced (60-90%), rework (50-90%) and delivery improvements (60-90%), etc. [4 and 13].
On the other hand, in case of education industry, there are very few examples where Lean tools and techniques have

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been implemented in higher educational institutes (HEI). For instance, [14] has explored the Lean based tools and tech- niques to examine the conceptual problems of applying con- tinuous quality improvement in higher education. Similarly, [15] has presented a case study in applying Lean sustainability concepts to HEI. In these case studies however, there is no clear inference being drawn that how the waste can be related at the operational level with the originally defined wastes in the Lean manufacturing philosophy. The main aim of this pa- per therefore, is to present a clear picture of waste in HEI and how this can be interpreted in Lean terminology. This paper is structured as; firstly, in section 2, the Lean philosophy being introduced briefly in context of manufacturing, which illus- trates the concept of Lean, five principals and seven wastes. Further, in section 3, derives relation between Lean and HEI operation and defines waste for HEI processes w.r.to Students, Research and Staff and section 4, discusses the importance of the implementation of Lean in HEI. Finally, Section 5 presents the key highlights of the research and elaborates on the future work.

2 LEAN PHILOSOPHY

Lean manufacturing is one of the initiatives that many major businesses across the globe have been trying to adopt in order to remain competitive in an increasingly competitive global market. Lean philosophy originated in Japan from Toyota production system having the fundamental concept of a con- tinuous flow production. Lean did not rely on the long pro- duction runs to be efficient, despite it was based on the recog- nition that only a small amount of the total time and effort adds value to the end customer. In fact, this was clearly against the mass production system originally developed by Henry Ford, which supports production of large volume of standardized products with minimal product changeovers [16]. The basic idea is to develop a highly efficient, customer focused and streamlined system. Researchers have regarded lean as a total business philosophy that can be applied to all aspects and types of manufacturing. The main concept of lean is in concentrating to highlight the added and non-added val- ue process/activities, which can help in improving the effi- ciency of production lines by expenditure of resources for a goal and service or end product except waste. The main focus remains waste reduction through a systematic approach of continuous process improvement at the pull of customer in pursuit of perfection. The ultimate benefits of reducing the waste can be seen as shorten lead times, improved quality, competitive advantage, reduced cost, etc. [5, 17, 18 and 19]. The idea is to develop a system that can flexibly respond to the customer demand and efficient at the same time.

2.1 Five Principals

Lean is based on the five principals, which are the basic build- ing blocks for the Lean philosophy implementation. Table 1, illustrates the fundamental concept of Lean based on five key principles [9, 12, 16, 19 and 20]. Implementing five Lean princi- ples ensures that overall organizational strategy is followed by continuous review of your processes to ensure that they are constantly and consistently delivering value to your customer.
This allows organizations to maintain its’ high level of service whilst being able to grow and flex with a changing environment and it does this through implementing sustainable change.

TABLE 1

LEAN FIVE PRINCIPALS

2.2 Lean Wastes

From the basics definition of Lean, an activity is not waste if and only if it transforms the product into something the cus- tomer wants. Waste is therefore, anything that doesn’t add value to product from customer point of view but adds to- wards the time and cost. It is essential therefore, to highlight the value added and non-value added activities from process such that non value added activities can be targeted for re- moval in order to achieve high quality, customer satisfaction and profit [18 and 19]. Some of the non-value added activities however, are still important to make end product according to customer specifications. For example, from customer point of view set-up time is waste but set-up time is essential to add value to final product. However, setup time can be reduced under lean continuous improvement exercise. Table 2, briefly illustrates over the waste/non-value added activities in Lean context [2, 9, 10, 12, 18, 21, and 22].
There are different Lean tools and techniques being used to

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reduce waste, these are referred as Lean building blocks; some of which for instance, are pull system, Kanban, work cells, total productive maintenance, total quality management, quick changeover, point-of-use-storage, batch size reduction, visual controls, 5S, standard operations, etc. Explaining these tools in detail is out of scope of this paper however, section 4 introduces the usage of some of the tools from the improve- ment point of view in higher educational institutes (HEI).

TABLE 2

WASTE IN LEAN

Motion erate the manufacturing facility is wasteful.

Whilst they are in motion they cannot support the processing of the product Excessive move- ment of data, decisions and information. Ineffi- cient layout, defects, reprocessing, overproduc- tion and non-standard working methods are the causes of excess motion. Standard and well documented operations are essential to reduce excess motion.

3 LEAN AND HEI

In modern educational environment competition is fierce. In fact, HEIs are in an edge to edge competition with both na- tional and international institutes in terms of quality of service provided to students against the fees paid. The overall quality of service here represents the educational facilities in terms of educational quality, learning environment, facilities (lecturing, labs, library etc.) and the services provided to support these facilities in terms of student life and experience. Along this in recent years, addition to the basic educational facilities, stu- dents search for other marks of quality: safe and up-to-date residence halls, state-of-the-art facilities, and the latest offer- ings in technology. In order to provide these facilities to stu- dents fees have been increased astonishingly over the years. At the same time, increased fees have increased the student expectations and in turn this has build up pressure on HEI to improve their services; which has lead to the idea of doing more with less. To find success therefore, HEI must demon- strate that they can offer what others cannot. In the competi- tive context, one of the most efficient ways forward is to use the resources optimally or efficiently by reducing waste from the different activities in order to reduce the operational cost and to improve the quality of service [4, 23 and 24].
One of the aspects of this research is to understand the waste is at three main levels or fundamental blocks of any HEI, i.e. Student, Research and Staff. All three are complemen- tary measure for the performance of any HEI. For instance, students and research are the two main sources for the income to the university, which implies that to maximize the income from the research and students, waste has to be removed from all the activities related to these processes, which can be due to the direct and indirect relation between the internal processes. For instance, both academic and administrative processes have the impact on the student and research in terms of added cost and quality of service, waiting, extended lead times, etc. On the other hand, academic staff is one which is representing university for its academic excellence, in fact attracts more students and research income and support staff fulfills all the supportive needs. Waste therefore, needs to be targeted for removal from the perspective of academic and support staff to make operations more efficient and cost effective.
Although universities have developed their process im- provement tools and techniques according to the specific problem they want to tackle. However, studies have shown that despite providing the outstanding performance in aca- demic field there is still room for improvement in the adminis- trative processes as the processes. According to [23 and 24],

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based on a number of case studies, there is significant impact when Lean philosophy had significant effect in terms of:
1. Changing the practices which were used for years and are not efficient anymore.
2. Bringing awareness among the employees to bring the change.
This has shown positive outcomes in terms of staff and stu- dent experience. However, there is a still lot of opportunity of improvement due to the limited understanding of the key principals as very little improvements were shown in terms of cost reduction. There is a need for more focus on developing the basic building blocks of Lean and better understanding of processes and value from the perspective of HEI customers.

3.1 Waste in HEI

From the basic definition of the first Lean principal (Table 1), the first step is to understand what value is and what activities and resources are absolutely necessary to create that value and everything else is waste. The main focus is to remove the steps from processes that are not necessary and do not add any val- ue for the student, research or staff.
In order to understand the concept of implementation let’s consider the basic process; such as lecturing, new student en- rolment, research biding, etc. Each of the process is made up of discrete steps that consist of a defined beginning step, a defined end step and there are number of steps to go from the beginning to the end. These intermediate steps produce the required product or service for the end customer i.e. student, staff or research in this case. It is therefore, essential to under- stand the intermediate steps that what value these steps add from the end customer’s perspective. Once these value added steps are identified then waste can be eliminated. In order to understand Lean manufacturing waste in HEI Table-A (Ap- pendix A), exemplifies the waste in the HEI processes w.r.to Student, Research and Staff.

4 DEGREE OF IMPLEMENTATION AND INDEGIENCE

In The second main issue this paper addresses, is the im- portance of implementation of Lean in HEI and what process- es can be improved in the tradeoffs of cost of implementation of Lean and improvements made from Lean implementation in terms of invested money and time. In fact, some of the pre- vious studies have shown that to be competitive in the mod- ern HEI environment, services needs to be expended much beyond the basics of education i.e. delivering lectures, mark- ing, generating results, etc. There are pressure to expand ser- vices which can benefit both students and staff i.e. staff to achieve their long and short term goals, improve student per- formance, achieve research excellence, maintain the number of students and best quality students, meeting workplace re- quirements, etc. at minimal cost due to pressure of decreased funding from government [4, 15, 23 and 24].
One of the examples of waste from the staff perspective is
finding a student file; discrete steps for this process can be
logging in to the system, search for the student file, retrieve
file and email or print the file. Waste can be identified in the
process as:
1. If the data is not stored in appropriate directory, using
the standard naming conventions then going through the file system to find the student information can be tedious.
2. Even this can be impossible to find student information if this needs to be retrieved by a person who hasn’t stored the student information
On the other hand, this process is simple if a standard pro- cedure for student data storing and standard naming conven- tions being used, which can remove all these non value added activities going through the different directories in order to retrieve the information. Even going step further, implement- ing a file access interface and having the different levels of access rights for the stored information across the staff hierar- chy can remove the step of requesting the information from different sources. This can reduce the waste of excessive mo- tion. Some of the basic Lean tools without huge investment of time and money can be implemented, such as 5S, Lean crea- tive problem solving, root cause analysis, process mapping, spaghetti diagrams, value stream mapping, visual manage- ment techniques, team meetings, brain storming, etc. Similar- ly, there are numerous other processes, which can be im- proved using similar tools or possibly more complex tools, some of these processes are; admissions, timetabling, attend- ance monitoring, teaching, assessment, fees collection, library processes, research life cycle, etc.
Certainly there are some recommendations given by previ- ous studies based on the simple Lean tools and techniques [4 and 23], which stresses on the understanding of end-to-end processes i.e. student, research and staff life cycles and adding value according to their requirements. Evidently some the benefits of Lean implementation in HEI can be given as:
1. If the data is not stored in appropriate directory, using
the standard naming conventions then going through
the file system to find the student information can be
tediousLean can deliver benefits to support the quali-
ty and timing of information, which can lead to better
processes and satisfied customers.
2. Using standard operation procedures can lead to pro-
cess improvement by:
a. Avoiding data collection, processing and anal-
ysis errors.
b. Avoiding collection of same data several
times.
c. Standardizing the visualization and flow of in-
formation to minimize the errors or misinter-
pretation.
d. Standardizing the policies and regulations
across the departments in order to minimise
the confusion over the process flow.
e. Minimising the mishandling of information or
decisions by excessive moment of information.
3. Using problem solving techniques that can work
across the departments and teams and can be learnt
easily. Developing the active problem solving struc-
tures can lead to the effective process improvement activities.
4. Improving the visual management across the organi- zation by having;
a. The consistent layout across.

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b. Standard format to display information, an- nouncements, performance, student results, timetable, etc.
5. Development of better communication and infor- mation delivery methods by sharing the best practic- es.
6. Workplace and information flow improvement using the 5S’ to reduce the errors and mishandling of the in- formation.
7. Having tasks being scheduled in correct order and ef- fective resource allocation can improve the quality of service across student, research and staff.
8. Minimising the data and physical inventories to re- duce cost and improve quality of service. Physical in- ventories are stationary and the equipment ordered in excess. Data inventory represents the data being saved at several places or same data being collected
several times, which can lead to errors, mismatching or mishandling of data.
9. Improving process efficiency, flexibility and im-
proved performance.
10. Reduce backlogs, cost, error and wasted time, which
all contributes towards released capacity.
11. Increased productivity, problem solving and job satis-
faction among staff.
Table 3, illustrates the possible ways of waste elimination
by implementing some of the simplest procedures of the Lean
process improvement, such as 5S, standard operation proce-
dures, multi-skilled workers, etc, which are generic steps can
be applied across the different processes.

TABLE 3

POSSIBLE WAYS TO ELIMINATE WASTE

All of this however, comes with a cost, most importantly requires the commitment from the staff especially from the management to implement the changes. According to [23 and
24] senior management needs to be actively involved and needs to take the ownership of lean programs. In fact, the idea behind the Lean implementation is just not to implement changes but sustaining those changes effectively in order to develop a continuous process improvement methodology.

5 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSSION

It is evident from previous studies that Lean programmes have significant impact when implemented in the HEI. The most important aspect is to create an understanding of the need to change, revising process and practices, which are not touched for years and enabling staff to challenges these work practices [4 and 23]. There is not much literature present where the Lean implementations have been discussed and relation to the original seven wastes being created. While, the particulars of how Toyota or other manufacturing organiza- tions have applied Lean solutions in their circumstances may not all fit in the HEI, the wastes needs to be identified w.r.to the problems in HEI. Current research has investigated the implementation of Lean in the HEI at different levels and it is clear that not only the manufacturing organizations but HEI can also reap benefits from Lean tools and techniques at oper- ational, administrative and strategic level. Also, the other main difference is the problems and their complexity, associ- ated variables and the way variables are represented. One of the main objectives of this paper is identify waste w.r.to the main focuses in the HEI i.e. Student, Research and Staff and relate it to the original Lean waste so that a process improve- ment framework can be established. There are no previous studies which has identified waste w.r.to basic elements of HEI i.e. student, staff and research. This can provide a starting point for process improvement activities by providing the basic information about the possible waste in HEI. However, as a part of continuous process improvement framework, go- ing through the basic process will reveal hidden layers of waste, which may require more sophisticated tools and tech- niques. Along this, to reap the true benefits of Lean philoso- phy individual processes needs to be investigated at opera-

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tional level.

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APPENDIX – A

TABLE A

WASTE IN HEI

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