Lean Management in Higher Education (LHE)

The origins of lean practices date from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrial engineering. Lean practices have evolved over the decades since then to become much easier for non-specialists to understand and use. It is now common for people with backgrounds and interests far from industrial engineering to become highly competent lean management practitioners. Therefore, the lean management system has the benefit that everyone in an organization can apply the practices without the need for specialists. Lean higher education (LHE) refers to the adaptation of lean thinking to higher education, typically with the goal of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of operations. Lean, originally developed at the Toyota Motor Corporation, is a management philosophy that emphasizes “respect for people” and “continuous improvement” as core tenets. Lean encourages employees at all organizational levels to re-imagine services from a customer’s point of view, removing process steps that do not add value and emphasizing steps that add the most value. Lean focuses on the concentration of valued-added activities or products and the elimination of waste. Examples of waste in higher education can be described with the TIMWOOD model given in Table 17.1.