Losses VS Opportunities: Principles of Lean Management in the Academic Field

Abstract

Currently, the concept of lean management is increasingly becoming the focus not only of representatives of the production sector, but also of educational and scientific organizations, healthcare organizations, government and regional authorities, etc. In this article, the authors show that the implementation of lean management principles and tools in the activities of academic organizations allows you to “restart” many processes and reduce the loss of quality and productivity by several times without significant costs. The first part of the article describes the main stages of the formation of the lean management concept and the contribution of Russian scientists (A.K. Gastev, I.V. Rebelsky (the basics of lean mental labor)) to the development of both methodological and practical recommendations that currently constitute the core of the philosophy of lean manufacturing and management. The central place in the article is devoted to the features and classification of losses in relation to both the activities of the organization as a whole and the activities of scientific and pedagogical workers (along with the “classical” classification of losses developed by T. Ono and J. Liker, ten features were emphasized to identify losses in the academic field). Among the reasons that led to an increasing interest in the use of lean management technologies in the academic field, the authors highlight the following ones: strengthening management and formalization in assessing performance indicators, strengthening information asymmetry, changing the level and quality of communication of employees, updating the problem of precarization of scientific and pedagogical workers’ employment and gradual blurring of the boundaries between work and rest. In the final part of the article, a set of recommendations was formed to identify losses in the activities of scientific and pedagogical workers, and an algorithm for their elimination was proposed.