Enterprise Ireland Lean Plus

Not at all. While the origins of the Lean approach are from a  manufacturing study, Lean applies to any business — including services, admin, finance, logistics, and healthcare. Anywhere there’s a process, the Lean approach can help improve it.

In some ways, Lean is an unfortunate word. The approach is aimed at growing businesses ands making them more competitive.

Lean is about understanding customer value, engaging the entire team on adding this value and eliminating waste (everything else!). Provide more value, attract more customers and grow the business (and jobs).

One Lean approach is to ‘stop and fix’. This means shifting our mindset from getting the job done, no matter what, to taking some time to stop the work and begin to fix recurring issues. These issues are generally already known to the team. Fixing issues now often frees up capacity in the future.

Many teams start seeing quick wins within a few weeks. With consistent effort, Lean can drive noticeable improvements in quality, speed, and teamwork in 2–3 months.

Common areas include bottlenecks, delays, rework, poor communication, cluttered workspaces, inconsistent processes, or customer complaints — Lean helps identify root causes and solve them systematically.

No. We call Lean “Structured Common Sense”. While Lean includes some Japanese terms like “5S” or “Kaizen,” you don’t need jargon to get results. The focus is on practical improvement using simple tools that your team can learn and apply. It is a non-academic approach. 

Management must support the programme and provide direction. Lean works best when everyone is involved. In fact, frontline staff often have the best ideas for improvement — Lean encourages a culture of continuous feedback and ownership.

Lean Start is a short project (7 days over 3 to 4 months). Lean Plus is a longer, more structured project to embed Lean thinking typically over 6 to 9 months. Both are grant-supported.

You can begin with a Lean Start project — it’s 80% funded by Enterprise Ireland and gives your team a hands-on introduction. From there, you can decide if Lean Plus is the right next step.