Theories and principles of designing lean service process

Service industries accounted for 84% of U.S. employment in December 2007. If banishing waste is the core value and mission of Lean, what would be the opportunity cost of delayed diffusion of Lean from manufacturing to services? This paper addresses the question by proposing ten Lean principles of service process design. We first review the theoretical underpinning of services in the operations management and service marketing literature. Drawing from the experience of evaluating more than 150 Lean process design projects, we identify some common design problems that can benefit from adopting existing service theories or some of the Lean principles. We then discuss how these Lean principles can offer new insights to existing service theories.