True North Solutions Private Limited

Transforming organizations to become agile, competitive and future proof, aided by lean principles enabled with emerging digital technologies. The world around us is moving at a rapid pace, thanks to the rise of digital technology. Companies worldwide have to take efforts to embrace such technologies and become future-proof. With so many promising technologies like Artificial intelligence, IoT, Virtual workspaces and others, it is typically the tendency for companies to ‘jump’ into certain technologies only to realize it as wasted effort, as they may not effectively deliver the expected business value. This is where embarking on the digital transformation journey with a Lean approach helps. Lean is all about identifying VALUE from a customer perspective and aiming to achieve a VALUE STREAM(all business activities that comprise of value added and non-value added activities) with zero or minimal waste to fulfill that Value. Elimination of waste helps in achieving what any business seeks; (i.e) improved agility and competitiveness. Companies with a strong lean foundation take a macro-view of their business using an end-to-end Value Stream approach. They not only identify wasteful activities and eliminate them, but also augment value by implementing the right digital technologies in the Value streams. For example, in a procurement value stream, the first step is to simplify it by eliminating waste using lean techniques. As a follow-on step, identifying/introducing relevant digital technologies like Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning can help automate many repetitive tasks like inventory/order management that unlocks value multifold. More importantly, such digital tools are built on a value stream that is already optimized significantly with the Lean methods that amplifies the impact of such a transformation. Hence, in our view, a company’s effort that involves digital transformation layered on top of sound Lean principles will be an effective approach.