Lean Thinking focuses on a relentless elimination of waste in an effort to deliver greater value to the customer. It’s important to understand how to identify the waste in Church operations. In this article we will cover the 5 main categories of waste as defined by TheLeanChurch.com (there are actually 7 categories as per the Lean Enterprise Institute – but we have consolidated these categories to simplify things and to better reflect the common waste that exists in a Church).
———————————————————————————————————————————— …thorns had come up everywhere,the ground was covered with weeds, and the stone wall was in ruins. Proverbs 24:31 ————————————————————————————————————————————
We use the acronym W.E.E.D.S. to represent the 5 categories of waste in a church. Here they are with some examples.
1.Waiting – Program delays, waiting in registration lines or sign-in lines, waiting to get out of a busy parking lot
2.Excess Motion – unnecessary motion, travel from location to location, searching for misplaced information/equipment
3.Extra Processing – multiple sign-offs, most meetings, multiple systems, basically anything that overlaps for no particular reason
4.Defect Correction - incorrect data entry, wrong processing of forms, wrong execution of a (poorly communicated) process
5.Surplus Production – preparing extra reports, reports not acted upon, excess inventory of study guides and handouts etc.
Waste is common in every environment and a church is no exception. The waste may actually be different but it exists nonetheless. The challenge is to identify the waste and eliminate it from the process. Herein lies the power of Lean. By equiping Change Apostles with the right tools and training Lean can become a very useful approach to streamine church operations and deliver greater value to the congregation, crowd, and community.
Andrew Hunter
