Lean Management in a Salon

1. 0. About the comstance Yel first gear Nails beauty parlor is a privately run traffic which specializes in nail c be and started off as a nail-bar 5 years ago. It is a small setup with 10 serve up staff, one main work floor, 2 treatment rooms, a storeroom, a pantry and a restroom. The proprietor visits the dish parlour e truly mean solar day for a couple of hours to keep an eye on the oer-all running of the beauty parlour and to ensure work is being done up to the standard. The beauty parlor serve astir(predicate) 20 nodes on weekdays and up to 40 customers on weekends/ pecker seasons, and receives about 20% turn-outside guests daily. . 1. Main products and improvements The core benefits provided by the salon argon divers(prenominal) types of manicures and pedicures. Since 2010 the salon has grown in popularity and seen a demand from regular clients to offer much varied utilitys, so whisker treatments, massage gos, hair removal and specialized facials bro ok been introduced. The salon too derivations nail polishes which the customers crowd out purchase. 1. 2. The customers The client base consists of women from low to mid-income families residing in the bea.These atomic number 18 women that like the convenience of having a salon close by that they ignore visit regularly and pamper themselves, unless non blow a hole in their pockets by doing so. A lot of the customers treat their salon cartridge holder as a wantment rather than an indulgence and one-armed bandit it in as a job in their busy schedules. 1. 3. set up qualifiers and grade winners for the company The order winners for the salon are the prices offered a extensive with the decor and environment.There are no other salons in the area with a duplicate stylish interior spot offering similar competitive rates. either salons that offer this type of ambience leave alone be too pricey, and those that are not, pass on not bedevil the same sort of interiors. The o rder qualifiers are the experience of the staff, the profits offered and the location. 2. 0. Challenges One of the biggest challenges faced by the traffic is that a lot of customers have to be turned a instruction beca engagement the salon is inefficient to accommodate them in several ways. plot of land a lot of similar salons achieve on mod and walk-in customers, in Yellow Nails, unless you have pre plotted the visit and booked, you will not be attended to, even if is it a case of adding an extra treatment during your visit. Appointments are made and not kept, yet the staff is obligated to sit idle until the customer arrives and turn out walk-in customers. Another major problem is that a lot of magazine is taken up by each customer alone as a single specialist attends to a customer at a time, while other staff waits for their booking to arrive.There have been occasions when it has been witnessed that virtually roll-on wax has been thrown away because it has dried up so the colleague has had to open a new case, which is also the case with other beauty products. Seemingly, in that location is quite a bit of wastage collect to old stock being kept. Another issue seems to be that though the staff is very friendly and their work is of a amply standard, the space around them is not very organized, resulting in longer waiting time for the customer, even amongst services.Along with these challenges, the exist of trading operations is high, as the owner gets the spa products from Switzerland which she visits periodically and stocks up on her visit and has also invested heavily in treatment machines, which require regular maintenance. These factors show that it is quite important for the railway line to structure its operations more effectively in order to generate more suitable profits. 2. 1. Evidence Having been to the salon legion(predicate) generation and witnessing the problems on a commencement exercise-hand basis, there is no doubt that the pr oblems observed do truly exist.Many businesses have challenges which are buried under a shiny exterior, just when the customer starts go about it directly, you know its an issue that accepts to be dealt with immediately, possibly more critically in a service- ground company. 2. 2. Effects on the Business While the salon is making sufficient revenue, it is losing out on prospective business because the jobs are not streamlined effectively. Having spoken to the manager of the salon about how the business is fulfiling, she said it is doing quite well and they are making goodish money.On the slightly negative side, she went on to say that they are unavailing to hire any more staff because they dont have space to accommodate more customers at one time and the owner had no intention to expand the space. What was perceived from the discussion was that they do roll in the hay that a lot of customers have to be turned away due to which they are losing latent business, and that the ow ner is interested in hiring more girls in order to boost profit but is unable to, and she doesnt guess there is any other solution to this problem.The obvious answer, as per the owner, is that more staff equals more customers, which means more revenue. ? 3. 0. slender carrying out in the service sector Traditionally, Lean practices have been givingly associated with the manufacturing industry, with literature and methods of performance being more accessible in that particular sector. We therefore visualise at the research of several authors that discuss how unravel give notice be employ in service industries and the factors that need to be focuse on in order to be able to do so.We also air at the different frame plant life of lean that makes it a recommended advance. 3. 1. Literature Review The bourn Lean management has first been used in the book The car That Changed the World by Womack, Jones and Roos (1990), describing the fundamentals of the Toyota production system as lean production (Coote and Gould, 2006). Following on from which, Coote and Goulds (2006) literature talks about lean as a concept that has come to mean different things to different people, from claiming that most view it as a collaboration of capability and low cost which they depict as being a speciate view.They provide a more whole rough definition describing it as delivering customer value without lay waste to. As businesses tend to score a high importance to their customers, it would be inevitable that a concept with a large focus on that factor would be adopted, although one would question whether the onward motion is only fit for a manufacturing company. Abdi et al (2006) state that lean throw out be applied to service sectors and that there are similarities and differences in adopting the approach from a service point of view.Their literature discusses five different principles from the works of Womack and Jones (1996) and how these lean manufacturing principles trick be applied to the service sector, which includes specifying value by service, indentifying the service value stream, making the service flow, supplying at the take out of the customer and implementing the pursuit of perfection and in order to apply these principles, they place the human element as a crucial variable in the services sector.Another piece of literature, researched by Bonaccorsi et al (2011), concludes that lean thinking has the potentialities to be utilise in the service industry as an effective way to cut costs and increase customer satisfaction. They emphasize that applying lean to service is challenging which is why lean concepts must often be redefined in a proper way, and to solve this, the concept function Value swarm Management (SVSM) has been developed.This approach is flexible in nature and cease be applied to a wide range of cases, including Yellow Nails salon, wherein the principles of lean need to be tailored to the requirements of that particula r sector. As SVSM is claimed to be flexible and used functionally as a general guide, there should be no complications to develop a true lean service via its implementation. Piercy and Richs (2009) research findings highlight that through the adoption of lean service tools, service business privy serve the traditionally competing priorities both of operational cost reduction and of increased customer service shade.The lean approach is formalise in the service context and proposed as a valuable gain to traditional service marketing approaches to services improvement. In their paper, they present the selective information on the implementation of lean impact approaches in the call vegetable marrow context highlighting rapid improvements such(prenominal) as value identification, cover/value stream mapping, and removal of barriers to flow value to the customer. An empirical lead by Alsmadi et al (2012), analyzes the differences in the relationship between lean practices and unb endable performance in the UK manufacturing and service sectors.Although lean practices have been success fully implemented in many manufacturing cases, their effect on firm performance in both manufacturing and service sectors is soundless limited. First, the empirical findings in both sectors enkindle that Lean practices are positively associated with firms performance and the degree of impact on performance is also identical between the two sectors, therefore their subscribe supports the positive argument concerning the applicability of Lean practices in service firms and their potential effect on performance.The results also suggested that soft Lean practices related to customer and HR management in the service sector was performing highly which is why it is essential, as stated by other authors, that Lean practices need to be distilled and tailored to the specific features of the sector. Once the idea of lean principles has been original that is can be implemented by a serv ice base company, it would be important to focus on the specific internal implementation techniques, wherein Malayeff (2006) attempts to provide insight into the management of an internal service system derived from a perspective of Lean management.He claims this would exist within professional service units of development, engineering, information technology, human resources and consumer affairs. In the case of Yellow Nails salon, the focus would be on the HR and consumer functions.. Malayeffs (2006) study stated that internal service systems have numerous common structural characteristics including the importance of information, process flows across functions, many hand-offs of information, hidden costs and benefits and no explicit motivation for urgency.The wasteful activities can be classified into seven groups delays reviews, mistakes, duplication, movement, processing inefficiencies and resource inefficiencies, and he bring that the most common problems included a lack of st andard procedures, long service times, communication break smooths and poor personnel management, out of which all but communication breakdowns are issues that Yellow Nails salon can be seen as a victim of. Draghichi and Petcu (2011) also propose Lean Six Sigma as a strong leadership approach for improving management rocesses, while reducing errors which can in turn help both the organization and its employees do things quicker and better through quality principles, resulting in improvements at all service organization levels Bortolotti and Romano (2012) developed a framework based on a study they conducted wherein they found that the automation of a process that is not streamlined can generate problems that can slow down the flow of work and increase errors. They state that a process should first be mapped to highlight waste and only when the new process is streamlined, can it actually be automated.They go on to say that by doing so, the new process will automate only value-added a ctivities recognized by the customers which we will touch upon in more detail for Yellow Nails salon in section 4. 3. 2. Recommendations Though the authors state that through tailored concepts being applied to service sectors, lean can be effectively employed, it is important for authors in the field to depict more focused principles relating to lean practices for a full service based business, which seems to be missing. 4. 0. Project Plan for Lean ImplementationIn order to fix the problems that the business is facing, I would propose a new business model incorporating a lean approach. Lean focuses on elimination of waste (Slack et al, 2010) and the following are some of the Muda, or non-value adding work for the customer that can be eliminated with the suggested operational implementations. 4. 1. Reducing waiting time Yellow Nails Salon will benefit from eradicating the appointment system that they are truely enforcing, which in fact ties up the service slot, even if the customer is late due to the business policy that could be given to a walk-in customer.Management should quite implement job cards with a list of what treatments the customer wants with service being given on a first-come-first-serve basis. This will allow for the business to maximize the number of customers they are taking on daily, not turn any customers away and eventually cut down on the waiting time of the customer. 4. 2. Full utilization of Human Resources Currently, the staff is not being utilized to their maximum capability so it would be just to the business to excite the way the service staff is taking on workload.A full utilization of all staff at all times approach should be set into place, so if there is one customer and two staff members available, they should both attend to the client to speed up the service where possible . This would essentially free up 50% of the clients time in the salon, which no doubt will be give them better value for money. The improved efficiencies can be highlighted by illustrating this using Value Stream map. 4. 2. 1 Value Stream Mapping Value stream mapping focuses on value-adding activities and distinguishes between value-adding and non-value-adding activities (Slack et al, 2010).The following is a simplified version showing the value added activities for a customer at the salon and highlights the waiting time as the waste which should be eliminated. manikin of customer x Requirement Manicure, Haircut & Waxing It can be seen that with the current means of operations, a customer with the mentioned requirements will be at the salon for three hours and 15 minutes, whereas by employing lean practices, their time can be cut down by a full hour and fifteen minutes. 4. 3. JIT implementation for beauty productsThough the owner may view it as a major set-back, it would be an intelligent decision to acquire a topical anesthetic supplier that can provide good quality products that the salon can order in smaller batches when req uired, rather than purchasing excellent quality products in large quantities, keep the stock in storage over long periods of time and throw a large portion of it away due to it being spoilt.. By introducing JIT, the salon can keep customers cheerful as well as combat avoidable costs. 4. 4. 5S principles implementationAnother factor that can improve customer service provided at the salon would be to reorganize the workspace by adopting the 5S lean implementation framework which would help the staff guide in a more orderly manner. The staff is directly customer facing so there is not a lot of background knowledge to waste time locating the required goods to service the customer. 5. 0. Conclusion To conclude, though the business is currently at a good stable position in the market with a loyal customer base, there is place setting for growth in terms of increased profits and new business which can only be enjoyed by Yellow Nails if it implements lean practices.The challenges which are currently faced comprising of turning away customers, long waiting time and wastage of stock can all be solved by incorporating the 5 principles of lean thinking, which include focusing on value of the customer, appreciating the value stream, concentrating on improved flow and perfecting quality. The business possesses some very strong attributes wherein some lean values can already be found such as the pull factor as staff is flexible in fulfilling customer requirement, and additional care is given to quality of service.However, there is still a gap in the model which is not allowing the business to perform at its full potential, and by tapping in to this area, going forward, Yellow Nails will be able to see substantial improvements. ? 6. 0. References Abdi, F. et al. (2006) Glean Lean How to use Lean approach in service industries?. Journal of helpers Research, 6 p. 191-206. Alsmadi, M. et al. (2012) A comparative analysis of Lean practices and performance in the UK manufactu ring and service sector firms. Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, 23 (4), p. 81-396. Bonaccorsi, A. et al. (2011) Service Value Stream Management (SVSM) Developing Lean Thinking in the Service Industry. Journal of Service Science and Management, 4 p. 428-439. Bortolotti, T. and Romano, P. (2013) Lean first, consequently automate a framework for process improvement in pure service companies. Production Planning & Control The Management of operations, 23 (7), p. 513-522. Coote, P. and Gould, S. (2006) Technical Matters Lean Management. Financial Management, p. 31-34 Draghici, M. and Jenica Petcu, A. 2011) Knowledge Transfer The Key to Drive Innovation for Service Organizations Excellence. Journal of Knowledge Management, Economics and Information Technology, (4), p. 44-53. Maleyeff, J. (2006) Exploration of internal service systems using lean principles. Management Decision, 44 (5), p. 674-689. Piercy, N. and Rich, N. (2009) High quality and low cost the lean service c entre. European Journal of Marketing, 43 (11/12), p. 1477-1497. Slack, N. et al. (2011) Essentials of Operations Management. Harlow Prentice Hall Financial Times, p. 1-318.