“It's the best thing that has happened to CERTPOINT and we all firmly believe that Lean Thinking is going to give us a competitive edge beyond anything else. Why? As a company, we always focused on customers and used "responsiveness" as the key measure of our customer service. As a result, we won awards for service excellence and received praise from customers. In fact, customers did better than just sending "thank you" notes. They increased their business, renewed contracts and helped us get new customers.

Consequently, we knew we were on to something good, but we also faced the issue of scalability: how to continue increasing our responsiveness with increased numbers of customers and their ever-growing needs. We talked about working smarter and doing more with less. We felt the need to move to a solution that would motivate performance for meaning rather than simply monetary reward. Thats what Lean Thinking is doing for CERTPOINT.”

The guiding spirit and overarching philosophy behind the practice of Lean Thinking can be expressed in one simple phrase: "less is more". The "less is more" approach means seeing work with different eyes using resource constraints (less) to spur new ways of thinking (more). It is about eliminating waste (MUDA) and complexity in order to focus on adding value to customers.