Lean management is to require companies who have the minimum resources (including manpower, equipment, capital, materials, time, and space), to create value to a maximum, so as to offer customers products of high quality and timely services; thus improving customers’ satisfaction. The aim lies in offering customers satisfying products and services and meanwhile reducing waste as much as possible. The food companies should regard customers’ demands as the guide to optimize the construction, improve the operational efficiency, accelerate the speed of reaction towards market changes, and improve enterprise’s core competitiveness.

Lean Management requires companies to use the “Lean Thinking” strategy. The basic rule of “Lean Thinking” is to create value as much as possible, and to supply new products and timely service with the minimum input of resources to customers, including materials, equipment, manpower, time and space, etc.

General restaurants can be one of the most wasteful places in our daily life when it comes to “lean management”. It is quite difficult for the managers of the restaurants to predict how much food should they produce without an accurate estimation, and thus, the restaurants will exceedingly possibly overproduce a lot of food. If they don’t get enough customers equal to the amount the food they prepare can serve, the redundant ones would be wasted. This kind of waste is not only a cost for the restaurant but also a threatening element for food security. On the other hand, for the customers, what they want is timely services and fresh food. However, under normal conditions, they do need to wait for a period of time for their ordered food, which occupies the seats and time for restaurants, preventing them to serve more customers.

From what we have discussed above, we need to find out a way or a method to guide the restaurant to improve their managing style to cut down the redundant produce. This is where the idea of “Lean Management” is used. There is a lot of waste during the production process, such as error-provide defective products or unsatisfied services; overstock-inventories caused by not enough demands; over-processing-process and program not necessary in fact; the superfluous carriage-unnecessary movement of goods. Wait-time wasted for the suppliers of goods or services cannot deliver the goods or services on time; redundant movements-unnecessary actions of stuff; and to provide customers with the goods or services they don’t need at all. The most crucial content of lean management is to reduce the existence of these waste phenomena.

According to Antony, lean is “determining the value of any process by distinguishing value-added activities or steps from non-value added activities or steps and eliminating waste so that every step adds value to the process”(Antony 2011). To sum up, lean is to eliminate waste and make every activity more valued.

A good example of the application of “Lean Management” is in a budget hotel.

All management activities of a hotel must under lean thinking. It is the key to produce value, which can only be determined by the customers. Their requirements and satisfaction is the goal of a budget hotel. In the market of budget hotels, for example, customers need quicker services. In order to meet this goal, fast check-out and free deposit service were born.

One example is the 90-seconds-check-out of economy hotels. This system regards customers’ satisfaction as the guidance of a kind of management requirements. (GRAPH 1) In order to achieve the goal of returning a room within 90 seconds to as soon as possible, the process to find out the impact of each of the rapid returns of the system should be solved one by one. By teasing the system and flow path of the reception desk, querying rooms could be placed before customers check out, and through the adjustment of IT equipment the system realizes 90 seconds fast check, etc.

Check out quickly launching project greatly enhances the customers’ satisfaction, which is a big relief for the hotels. Meanwhile originally, when it comes to the peak of hotel check-out, it usually needs two receptionists, but now it only needs one to complete all the reception tasks, so that the reception desk staff could be compressed. There have been some free accommodation deposit services leading management concept being launched by some Economy Hotels, which greatly reduce the workload and the check-in time for the reception staff and reduce labor costs.

By the way, some people may say there is a conflict between lean management and innovation. Personally speaking, lean management focuses on the control of cost and efficiency, while innovation could bring new business value to products and services, enlarge the market, and strengthen the company’s overall competitiveness through originality. If the company does both lean management and innovation at the same time, it will be the most profitable one, and its long-term competitiveness in the industry will be maintained.

Nowadays, the most important elements for a business are efficiency, cost, and customers. We all know that in 21 century, natural resources are becoming less and less, but the command is higher and higher. Lean management provides a new theory for businesses to think about how to maximize the use of limited resources so as to provide customers with the most satisfying products and services, which is greatly meaningful in the current situation.
Graph 1 Comparison between before and after 90 seconds check out of an economy hotel

Before 90 seconds check out After 90-second checkout
Time for an order ≥ half a day ≤ 90 seconds
Staff number ≥ 2 1
Customers’ satisfaction ☺☺☺ ☺☺☺☺☺