ABSTRACT
For a whole value stream to be productive—as opposed to just being a collection of busy individuals—we must learn to see and think differently. The traditional, industrial way to measure productivity is on an individual worker basis: e.g. how many widgets-per-hour each person can produce per time period. In professional office environments, performance evaluation is often done—at least in part—using measures of individual productivity. Lean thinking, in contrast, mostly takes humans out of the productivity equation. Lean takes a more holistic approach because it understands productivity as the combined output of people, processes, technology, and information working together as a system to produce results for customers. Lean productivity is simply measured as the number of units of work completed and delivered to the customer within a given time period. Lean measures productivity as a measure of the company’s delivery of value to the customer, not individual worker performance.
