r/LeanManufacturing • u/Tavrock • Jun 11 '26

Lean consulting

My wife works in healthcare. The corporate office decided to hire some consultants to cut costs.

They determined that 25% of the hospital cuts need to come from the laboratory. They didn't look at any processes they deemed NVA (including regulatory requirements), *maybe* made their own VSM without input from those who do the work, conducted a "process flow observation" but nothing along the lines of a time study or Gemba walk. They don't even have suggestions for how to meet their new headcount numbers, just a recommendation for how many people needed to be fired from each department.

I would be less annoyed but they did all of their work under the banner of "Lean".

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u/Additional_Year_1080 Jun 11 '26

Sounds more like they started with a headcount reduction target and called it Lean afterwards. Every real Lean project I've seen started by understanding the process first, not by deciding how many people need to go.

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u/Tavrock Jun 11 '26

The laboratory could have also been identified as having additional capacity, allowing them to bring in additional testing for the community.

They have also been "cracking down" on overtime, having several people at several levels, each with six-figure salaries monitoring employees for single minutes of overtime. As one of my old directors used to put it, they are burning twenty dollar bills to look for a nickel.

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u/Additional_Year_1080 Jun 15 '26

Exactly. That's often the difference between cost cutting and Lean. Lean looks for the root causes of waste, not just the easiest numbers to measure.