A Framework for Lean Implementation in

IT Support Services
Goutam Kumar Kundu
VIT Business School, VIT University, Vellore, India

International Journal of Research in Manufacturing Technology & Management

Volume 3, Issue 1, January-June, 2015, pp. 01-08
DOA : 15022015 © IASTER 2015, www.iaster.com

ABSTRACT

Lean is a broad concept and there are many opportunities for its application in service environment.
However, in comparison to implementation of lean concepts in manufacturing enterprises, its
implementation in service enterprises is rare.

This paper identifies the issues with respect to lean implementation in IT support service environment
and proposes a framework for implementing lean principles and techniques in IT support services. The
framework has been developed by associating lean concept’s core elements with IT service main flows.

Due to differences between IT support service and manufacturing, the direct application of lean
techniques is not suitable in many cases. This paper discusses these opportunities in a systematic way
and develops a framework for lean implementation in IT support services.

Keywords: Lean, IT Support Service, Framework, Implementation.

INTRODUCTION

IT support service organizations have been facing ever increasing challenges from their customers.
The customers are demanding more from their IT service providers than ever before [1]. In order to
meet the ever increasing challenges from the customers, IT support service organizations are focusing
on innovation and continuous improvement of processes [2], as they have realized that process
improvement with respect to the work activities is crucial to gain savings. In order to remain
competitive, IT support service organizations constantly look for and adopt the good practices for
faster and efficient ways to work.

With respect to IT support service providers in India, high attrition rate of their employees is a major
challenge. The organizations and jobs in information technology/business process outsourcing
(IT/BPO) are growing and susceptible to high levels of attrition [3]. Employee turnover can have
severe consequences if knowledge is not captured and preserved [4]. Many IT support service
organizations are affected by the attrition of the employees and in many instances the service delivery
gets impacted when key support engineers leave the company.

Fierce competition in global economy has led to a change in IT support service operation
management. IT Service organizations worldwide are beginning to realize that only those companies
that are efficient and able to meet the changing needs of customers will survive the fierce competition
of the marketplace.

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Lean concepts, originated first in the automobile factory floor of Toyota as Toyota Production System
(TPS) was the beginning of Lean practices in manufacturing and subsequently it was developed further
to reduce and eliminate wastes in the processes within the organization [5, 6, 7]. Krafcik, first used the
word “Lean” to describe the new production techniques introduced at Toyota after World War II [8].
Since Womack, Jones, and Roos [6] announced this concept as a new production paradigm, several
industries have dedicated great attention to the possibilities of applications to their environments.

Many manufacturing enterprises have achieved high level of productivity, competitiveness and
flexibility by implementing the lean concepts. In comparison, lean concepts are new to service
companies. Of late, lean concepts are being tried at some service enterprises. Lean is a broad concept
and there are many opportunities for its application in IT Services too.

Lean has now emerged as a core concept for improving efficiency and productivity in many industries.
Lean manufacturing focuses on bottom-up, worker-led improvements and a process wide approach to
production and there are many instances of organizations across a range of industries and countries who
have successfully implemented lean and have reduced costs and improved quality [6, 9].

Researchers have reported the results of lean approaches in retail and healthcare service areas [10].
The lean approach has been validated in the service context and with the adoption of lean service
tools; the service call centers can serve the traditionally competing priorities of operational cost
reduction and of increased customer service quality [11, 12]. However, the application of lean
principles in the service sector is at an infant stage [11, 12]. Lean approach has been validated in
software development and project management [13] but not in IT support service environment.

IT Service enterprises can also benefit from the advantages of lean management, although the approach is
less common at this type of enterprise. Researches argue that lean approach could be used to tackle issues
such as how to lower operating cost and increase customer satisfaction. The key questions are what
framework can be used to implement the lean effectively and efficiently in IT service operations.

Lean principle deployed to a detailed conceptual level, named core elements, is argued to be a better
basis for the discussion of potential applications in different environments, such as IT services.
According to lean concept, IT service is understood in this paper as a bundle of main flows. The
discussion of each core element for each flow points up opportunities of application.

The objective of this paper is to study the lean literature to understand the core lean concepts, the
characteristics of IT services and propose areas for implementing lean concepts in IT services. This
study has been constructed by matching Lean Thinking core elements with the IT service main flows.
Due to differences between IT service and manufacturing, the direct application of lean techniques is
not suitable in many cases. This paper discusses these opportunities in a systematic way.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: First, the author presents a brief overview of lean
core elements. In the next section, the highlights of lean application in service environment are
presented. Followed by this, characteristics of IT Support services are detailed. After this section, the
author has presented the framework for implementation. In the last section, the author concludes how
this framework can be useful.

LEAN CORE ELEMENTS

Waste elimination is the basis of Lean Thinking [14]. According to Liker [14], Lean is a manufacturing
philosophy that shortens the time line between the customer order and shipment by eliminating waste.

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There are several techniques or tools that have been developed, directly related to implementation of
Lean Thinking. These tools or techniques are the most visible components, and sometimes are
misunderstood, being confused with the whole system [15]. The understanding of the philosophy and
system that are behind these tools or techniques is fundamental. The techniques are more related to
operational aspects, system to integration aspects, and philosophy to conceptual aspects.

As lean philosophy, system and techniques have been developed and implemented in Toyota in an
inexplicit way, it becomes a difficult for other companies to understand its core elements of lean and
try to implement them. Many researchers and authors such as Shingo [15], Suzaki [16], have studied
the system from outside, providing descriptions focusing more on the system and its techniques.

Womack and Jones [17], Spear and Bowen [18] and Fujimoto [19] have understood the core elements
of lean from their perspectives.

Womack and Jones's Five Principles

Womack and Jones [17] have organized the fundaments of Lean Thinking in five principles:

 Value: specifying and enhancing value

 Value Stream: identifying the value stream and removing waste
 Flow: making the product flow
 Pull: letting the customer pull
 Perfection: managing toward perfection

Spear and Bowen's Four Rules

According to Spear and Bowen [18], the tacit knowledge that underlines TPS can be captured in four
basic rules:

 Work: shall be highly specified as to content, sequence, timing, outcome;

 Connections: all communications must be direct and unambiguous;
 Pathways: for every product and service must be simple and direct;
 Improvements: must be made using a scientific method at the lowest level in the organization.
Fujimotos's Three Capabilities

Fujimoto [19] analyzed the TPS from an evolutionary point of view and identified three levels of
capabilities that explain its sustained high performance and continuous improvement:

 Routinized manufacturing capability – related to the standard and accurate way to perform
activities in all company's processes;
 Routinized learning capability – routines for problem identification, problem solving and solution
retention;
 Evolutionary learning capability. – intentional and opportunistic learning capability of handling
system changes in building the above routine capabilities

Fujimoto reinterprets manufacturing activities as an information system, and summarizes the

production capability of the most effective Japanese automakers as dense and accurate information
transmission between flexible (information-redundant) productive resources (Fujimoto, 1999). The
dense aspect is related to productivity, efficiency, and waste elimination. The importance of a regular
pace of information transfer is also emphasized. Quality is interpreted as accuracy of information
transmission.

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LEAN IN SERVICES

According to some researchers, the lean concept is applicable in any organization, since the goal of an
organization is to create value for its end customers [17, 18]. In the service sector, people value faster
service and lean helps to eliminate waste from the value chain helping customer to receive the service
immediately [10]. Service companies are struggling with customer demands for better quality service
and managerial demands for cost reduction and according to [11], the service organizations are in
practice failing on both these counts, seeing increased costs and reductions in service quality [11].
Service companies are trying to improve the service quality, reduce cost and increase profitability by
implementing lean principles [10, 20].

According to Bowen and Youngdahl [10], organizations would pay greater attention to the investment
of people, rather than equipments by focusing on lean service. George [20] recommends that
employees should be involved in identifying the waste and hidden costs caused in different steps of
processes and this may result in reorganization of companies by less capacity, material and people to
perform the work more efficiently.

However, the application of lean principles in the service sector is not fully understood. The type of
challenges that can emerge in lean services and how to address them is yet to be determined. The
main difficulties arise due to the unique nature of operations in services. Services are intangible,
cannot be stored, and are usually labor intensive. According to Apte and Goh [21], in many services,
the workers are required to be highly skilled and they are called as knowledge workers [21]. IT
support service is one such type of services where employee skill requirement is very high. Due to the
customized nature of individual services, they vary from customer to customer. These specific
characteristics of services require adjustment of the lean production principles, and hence
development of new theoretical and practical insights.

The central concept in lean services is removal of wastes from service processes. There are a number
of challenges and various types of waste associated with services. Removing one type of waste may
give rise to another type of waste. The wastes in services may be both tangible and intangible. The
intangibility of waste makes it difficult to manage. For instance, the excess inventory of physical
products is considered a waste in manufacturing processes. However conventional concepts of
inventory and inventory reduction do not apply readily to the service processes. Therefore the type of
wastes and their management are fundamentally different in services.

Though application of lean concepts in the service sector has been underway for several years [10], it
is mainly limited to service contexts where a physical product exists (such as retail supply chain
management) or to healthcare.

Application of lean thinking has shown great success in healthcare system. By adopting lean, the
healthcare system analyzed the flow of activities and made improvement through process mapping
techniques, as well as identification and reduction of waste [22]. The other key area of lean service has
focused on handling of patients in healthcare system. Similar to a product progressing through an
assembly line, patients (materials) are seen as entering the operation, having operational activities
performed on them (such as admission, initial assessment, treatment regime) with an output being
produced (a person cured or otherwise). Even though there is criticism, this perspective has allowed the
use of established lean tools such as mapping techniques and waste reduction in healthcare system [23].

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By focusing on the flow of activities through the healthcare system, lean improvement approaches
have successfully adopted process mapping to identify areas of waste and inefficiency [22].

Researches argue that lean approach could be used to tackle issues such as how to lower operating
cost and increase customer satisfaction. Lean has the ability to address a wide range of problems faced
by service companies, such as: complexity reduction, sales force productivity enhancement,
operations risk control, cost leadership, combining scale with flexibility, service excellence, and
improving employee morale and involvement.

Lean in service sector is essential to add value to customers by providing services with higher quality
and speed the process by using fewer, but right resources. There is a need to analyze the non-value
added activities to reduce the cost and complexity. Also, organizations should focus on value added
activities from customers’ perspective.

Lean as a philosophy is new to the service companies, and many of them struggle to find the correct
approach for its adoption. Many declare early victory after a few successful projects only to realize
that the benefits do not sustain over a period of time. This happens because they do not really know
what it takes for a holistic Lean implementation in a service organization.

IT SERVICE CHARACTERISTICS

The main activities of IT support services are different from software development and project
management activities. IT support service activities are primarily concerned with resolving the
problems faced by the users of the software systems. There are numerous software problems including
application failures, security bugs, errors in user documentation, poor usability, availability and
performance problems associated with IT services. IT support service providers are responsible for
resolving these problems within the agreed time. Failure to resolve one of these problems may have
severe consequences depending on the criticality of the software. Problems concerning quality in IT
support service process can lead to, for example, the following symptoms: end users do not know
which contact person is the correct one and report problems to the wrong service desk; customers
claim that the IT provider does not react to the problems reported by customers; the number of open
problems rapidly increases in relation to closed problems at the service desk; and customers have to
wait a long time for solutions to problems. In IT support services, the interaction with the users is very
high and it is important that the users are kept updated about the status of the problem.

Lean Implementation faces challenges in IT service sector because of the nature of servcies:

 IT service is Service Level Agreement (SLA) driven- IT service is normally measured by SLAs. As
long as the overall service meets the SLAs the program and senior team management are happy.
 Nature of the Issue Life cycle and its duration- Typically, the issue life cycle is very short as
compared to the manufacturing sector.
 Lack of visibility about the status of issue- This is because the in-progress issue status is not
visible. Many a times, the support engineer sets the issue status a in-progress without providing
the details of activities that are being worked on to fix the problem.
 High-level Processes definition- Many of the processes related to fixing/ resolution of issues are
defined at a very high level. It becomes really difficult for someone who is new to understand the
actual procedural steps required to be followed.

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 Absence of Process capability baselines- In many cases, the IT support service organization
baseline capacity details.
 Team formation based on Technology- In many organizations; the support team formation is
based on particular technology skills (like Functional layouts in manufacturing). But, most often,
the fixing of issues may require multiple skills.
 Load is not balanced- It is often noticed that the resource allocation is not done based on the
work-load volume. As a result, some support engineers are over-loaded, where as some other
support engineers are waiting for issues to be fixed most of the time.
 Monotonous/Routine nature of work- This is a people-related issue. The support engineers work
on same technology and same system for a longer duration of time which is not so in software
development project.
 High Attrition rate- High attrition rate of support engineers is a major challenge for IT companies.
It affects quality of service as well as delivery time in many cases when an experience support
staff quits the company. Cost associated with training new staff is also high.
 Lack of documentation – In many supporting environment, there is lack of documentation
regarding the system to be supported and/or the steps to be followed to fix issues. Sometimes, the
documents may be available but it is very old and not updated with the changes that the system
may have undergone.
 High interaction with the user – There is usually high level of interactions between the support
staff and users of the systems in case of IT support services. Because of this, communication
skills (both written and verbal) of the support staff also need to be taken into consideration.
 Service quality is dependent on user perception- Like other services, the quality of IT services
also depends on the perception of the users in many cases.
 Odd service support hours- This is usually the case, when IT support staff are located in a
different country and there is a time zone difference between two locations. This may hamper
information flow due to the non-availability of users when support staff are working to fix issues
that need some clarification from the user.

PROPOSED FRAMEWORK FOR LEAN IMPLEMENTATION

The proposed framework for lean implementation is as follows:

 Identifying of main flows - The most important step is the identification of the major activities
and grouping them under different categories. Categorization should be based on the type of
requests (Change requests, password resetting requests, Issues related Software Systems etc).
 Depicting the flow path - This requires documentation of the steps with respect to each flow path.
 Identifying of non-value activities in the flows - Like manufacturing, IT service flows also
comprise value-added and non value-added activities. Here the focus is to first identify the non-
value added activities and indentify measures to eliminate/reduce the share of the non-value
added activities from the total time.
 Implementing of pull system - To the extent possible, pull system should be implemented. Tickets
raised to fix issues related to software follow a pull system as the user/customer experiencing
problems only raise tickets. Similarly, request for change is mostly pull system.

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 Balancing of work load - This is an important area. Work load of the support engineers should be
balanced properly; otherwise it may affect the team spirit.
 Developing cross-function skills – Support and issue fixing requires multiple skills (for example
to fix a particular issue, it may require skills of both unix scripting and Oracle database). It is
always better, if the same support engineer is having both unix and DBMS skills. Otherwise, the
same issue may require more time to fix if it has to pass to two support engineers. Cross
functional skills help in reducing non-vale added activities.
 Embedding mistake-proofing - Wherever possible, the process should be embedded with mistake
proofing tools/activities to reduce error.
 Implementing continuous improvement culture – This is very important for IT support services.
Effort should be to capture tacit knowledge of support engineers and document it in a structured
way. Also, proper analysis of issues should be carried out to find any trend and build a knowledge
database which can be used for issue fixing and training new support engineers.
 Base lining process capability – Data related to develop process capability should be captured and
baseline of important process capability should be established.

CONCLUSION

In this paper, the author has presented a list of IT service characteristics which should be taken into
consideration while implementing lean concepts in IT support services. The author has also proposed a
high-level framework for implementing lean core concepts in IT service environment. From the analysis,
the author concludes that the lean core concepts are applicable in IT support service environment. In the
future, the author proposes to study the applicability of lean tools in IT service environment.

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