What Is a Lean Daily Management System?

If you’ve been practicing lean for any amount of time you’ve likely heard about gemba walks, leader standard work, and obeya.

To be sure, as individual lean tools and concepts they’re powerful.  But, when you combine them with a few other components you end up with a much more robust lean daily management system.

In this article, I’ll provide an overview of the lean daily management system topic.  To learn more, be sure to check out our comprehensive suite of Daily Management System videos, PDF overviews, quizzes, and templates.

What is a Lean Daily Management System (DMS)?

Defined, Lean Daily Management is a system that allows us to know on a daily basis whether we are on track or off track to meeting our goals, to take corrective action, and to check that past actions and improvements are being sustained.

A Lean Daily Management System enables checking both our results and our processes.

First, the system aims to help us serve our customers by doing our best work on a daily basis. Like any management system, it must help us achieve our goals. This includes answering questions such as:

• Are we winning or losing?
• What actions do we need to take?
• Are we sustaining gains from the past?

How Does the DMS Build Lean Habits?

More important for the long-term, the Lean Daily Management System helps us build a set of habits so that lean thinking and practices become second nature. These habits include:

1. setting standards and making plans
2. making the actual status visible
3. going to see
4. checking plan versus actual
5. communicating
6. creating alignment across the organization
7. solving problems
8. coaching and developing people

Without these habits, many organizations find it difficult to sustain the gains of their improvement activities. Developing these habits helps us to sustainably deliver results using continuous improvement methods and tools. The Lean Daily Management System gives us the structure and routine to practice and get better at this each day.

What Are the 4 Essential Components of a DMS?

There are four essential routines in a Lean Daily Management System. The four routines are:

1. Daily Accountability Process
2. Leader Standard Work
3. Gemba Walks
4. Process Confirmation

What these activities have in common is that they are time-based and involve everyone in the organization. They help us ask, “How are we doing and what can I do to help?” The specific timing, content, sequence of activities, and who is responsible for each varies.

Daily Accountability Process is designed to engage people at all levels in making sure they have what they need to succeed at their work for the day and to ask for help when this is not the case. Daily Accountability activities may include:

• daily cleaning and checking of equipment
• daily safety reminders
• shift start meetings
• morning all-hands meetings
• daily team huddles
• tiered accountability meetings

Leader Standard Work is the routine for leaders at all levels to check on their teams, the status of progress on the day’s work, confirm that process standards are being followed, and find opportunities to coach and develop people.

Gemba Walks offer a flexible yet structured process for identifying opportunities, developing people, and learning about the day-to-day operation.

Process Confirmation is a set of audits of process standards that are incorporated into both routine and random checks.

What Are the 7 Enablers of a DMS?

There are seven essential enablers to building a Lean Daily Management System. These can be considered prerequisites that help the system function. The seven essential enablers of a Lean Daily Mangement System are: 

1. team size and span of control for team leaders
2. KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
3. standard work
4. visual controls
5. an escalation system
6. competence with practical problem solving
7. coaching

The effort needed to establish these routines and prerequisites will be different for each organization. We don’t need to be perfect at all of them before starting with Lean Daily Management. However, ignoring the need for one or more of these enablers is a sure way to weaken or even sabotage our efforts.

Free DMS Infographic

If you want the tenets of a lean daily management system summarized as a visual tool, we have you covered. The below infographic summarizes the entire daily management system.  Feel free to save the image and share it with others on social media, by email, etc.

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