Lean & mean: tightening up business processes not foreign to Native corporations.

• Author: Tobenkin, David
• Position: NATIVE BUSINESS

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Adoption of Japanese-style lean manufacturing techniques in America has been described as East meets West. But make way for a new Alaska wrinkle to the trend: East meets Native.

Patrick Anderson, Chugachmiut's Ivy League-educated executive director, has implemented at least 14 lean-efficiency improvement events since 2004 to maximize his organization's operational and administrative efficiencies. Chugachmiut Inc. is an Anchorage-based tribal consortium and Native health and social services provider.

LEAN AND MEAN

Lean production is a means of producing goods through a series of process improvements and continuous improvement cycles aimed at removal of waste, inefficiencies and production costs. It was popularized as a revolutionary advance in manufacturing services pioneered by Toyota through its Toyota Production System, but has since spread to general management principles and to the service sector as well. A typical pattern is for organizations to map out existing production or other business-process services, brainstorm on how to reduce steps and optimize processes, determine an optimal subsequent state, and train and check performance to achieve that result.

The number of Chugachmiut lean efforts continues to grow. Chugachmiut, which employs 160 to 165 year-round employees and 210 to 220 employees during peak periods, is currently managing 13 strategic and operational initiatives involving lean processes. They range from a complete reorganization of Chugachmiut's health care delivery system to installation of a new financial accounting software system to planning for implementation of an electronic records-management system, Anderson says.

Implementation of lean techniques have yielded impressive results, he says.

"Once we implemented lean, we found there was a huge excess capacity for our staff," Anderson says. "We freed up $500,000 in waste for expansion of programs in health care. Our new goals include a program for cancer care, which is our community's number one killer, that will include naturopathic and traditional medicine. And we now have excess capacity to manage new strategic initiatives. Lean has also allowed me to delegate and realized that it took 144 days to complete this process. When we reviewed the reasons for the delays, we quickly removed over two weeks of delay by creating a hire-requisition foresponsibility to division directors, who then use the lean tools they have learned to improve operations and focus on the mission our board wants us to work on."

While he says the effect on the bottom line is difficult to measure because of spotty records in place prior to his...