Integrating "new ways of working" through Lean in a company's culture is the toughest challenge. Much of this challenge arises because in typically "western" way of doing things: in other words the initial focus on methods and tools, while bringing impressive initial results, ultimately fail to deliver these benefits sustainably.

That's why a recent Capgemini survey found that 4 out of 5 organisations complain that lean has not delivered sustainable results. It is all too easy to forget that delivering Lean sustainably means bringing about a company-wide cultural change enabled by simultaneously acting on both bottom-up performance improvement and top-down leadership alignment. It is this latter area that brings the most challenges as it fundamentally challenges many traditional command and control constructs which we in the west have lived with ever since business school.

In financial services, for those that persist in understanding and delivering true Lean capability, the rewards are impressive:

• Credit card fraud disputes: activities representing 60% of the overall process reduced from 22 days to 9 minutes
• Insurance services: removed 12% of entire cost base
• Life insurance underwriting: £200million of new NWP in a new product with no staff increase
• Lease contract: set up reduced from 60 days to 8 days, smaller team to process 4 x previous volume
• HR recruitment: senior manager recruitment reduced from 85 days to 55 days saving £353,000 external costs in 18 months
• Complex bank account opening: reduced from 4 weeks to 3 days

For more on implementing Lean sustainable find out about Capgemini's BeLean® approach.

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