Lean in practice: Lessons for Higher Education Institutes

This paper presents and discusses the opinions of twelve experts and practitioners involved in implementation of lean initiatives. Opinions were ascertained through semi structured interviews with a number of experts including academics and consultants and with those involved with the implementation of lean initiatives and programmes within public sector organisations including healthcare, government offices and higher education. The results show that within service sector organisations, lean implementation is still in the early stages of maturity. In higher education what is questionable is to what extent implementation of these programmes falls under the premises of lean principles. What is argued in this paper is that what is implemented is actually a limited version of process re-engineering.

Additionally this paper presents a framework which can be used to facilitate implementation of continuous improvement and lean principles within the higher education sector.