Exploration of Lean Principals in Higher Educational Institutes – Based on Degree of Implementation and Indigence

Increased competition and scarcity of resources in global markets has augmented the problems for manufacturing industry, which has forced organizations to adopt new tools and techniques in order to find the proactive solutions. In Past, manufacturing industry has exemplified that the key to survive in highly competitive and rapidly changing environments is to implement the more effective, proactive and long term solutions to a problem. Similar to the manufacturing organizations, higher educational institutes are facing similar challenges such as increased competitions, higher quality of service at competitive cost and variability in customer demand in terms of requested services. In fact, in terms of problem landscape, associated problem variables and goals for higher educational institutes are similar as of manufacturing industries. The only difference is the way these are interpreted and represented. Lean principles and waste used by the manufacturing organizations are used as basic building block for this research. The main objective of this paper is to illustrate the waste in higher educational institutes with respect to the three fundamental elements i.e. Students, Research and Staff. This can provide the basic framework for other process improvement implementations in higher educational institutes. Along this, the other most important aspect is the indigence to implement Lean based approaches and up to what extent as well as effectiveness of implementation in terms of invested time, resources and money. The scope of this paper is limited to interpret the waste in higher educational institutes, which can act as basic framework for other process improvements in the educational industry. This is step forward to implement Lean based structure to the higher educational institutes in order to maximize the revenue, throughput and customer satisfaction with high quality products and minimize the cost and waste, which one of the objective of any organization.