As businesses slowly recover after shutdowns caused by the coronavirus outbreak, Lean methodology offers strategies and tools that can help get them back on their feet. Those with expertise in Lean or who have earned a certification will be familiar with many of these ideas.

They come from experts around the world who have emerged in recent weeks to offer advice for restarting commerce in wake of the pandemic-caused shutdowns after months of remote workplaces becoming the norm. Each of these tools can apply toward mitigating the further spread of the virus or help in vital areas such as supply chain.

Spaghetti Charts

Sometimes referred to as a workflow analysis diagram, a spaghetti chart maps the flow of people, materials and information within a process. As safety from the coronavirus becomes a primary issue, a spaghetti chart could prove useful to businesses who want to best practice social distancing.

In this case, the “process” is the business itself. The diagrammed flows include how customers enter, move about and exit a business, as well as how workers move as they perform their jobs and interact with customers. Gathering data on these movements through observation and charting movement, business managers can identify situations where maintaining social distancing is most likely to become an issue and make the changes necessary to ensure safety. This can prove especially useful to convenience stores, supermarkets and restaurants.

A Modified ‘Just in Time’ For Supply Chain

In a white paper on the need for changes in supply chain, LeanCor CEO Robert Martichenko wrote that up until the pandemic outbreak “a large part of our population believed that pandemics were a medical discussion and not a supply chain discussion. Now we know differently.”

Martichenko suggests educating the public on how supply chain works would curtail any run on future items, such as what happened with toilet paper and bottled water in the early days of COVID-19. But while those shortages were due more to hoarding than supply chain problems, Just In Time (JIT) supply chain strategy has been criticized for causing issues in the wake of the outbreak.

Some have blamed the JIT approach for low inventories of critical supplies in hospitals. However, as Martichenko points out, JIT does not require minimizing inventory, but optimizing inventory. He suggests that supply chains continue to use JIT for cycle stock, which is the supply needed for normal demand. But he suggested that suppliers develop strategies to address the need for buffer stock (to deal with spikes in consumer demand) and safety stock, which is stock needed to deal with a crisis such as COVID-19.

He also called for development of national core competency for supply chain built on Lean principles. He argues that rather than focus only on stockpiling inventory, businesses should focus on flexibility and having the capacity to surge product production and “make vital lifesaving products in the short term when new and unexpected demand hits us from a crisis.”

Root Cause Analysis

Lean practitioners also are in the perfect position to perform root cause analysis and help supply chains, especially those in healthcare and government, better manage inventory and supply chain in future crisis events. Some suggested ways include:

  • Using Lean tools such as regression analysis and The Five Whys to identify and eliminate the sources of errors and waste
  • Helping hospitals create better flow for patients from admission to discharge
  • Ensuring that hospitals are utilizing all potential beds and equipment in the most efficient way possible
  • Use Kaizen events to quickly solve challenges involving the movement of people through the system in a way that reduces the chance of infection