In 2008 United Biscuits, the £1.3 billion ($2.1bn) UK-based snack foods firm, took the bold step of putting its director of information systems in charge of expanding its successful Lean program. Head of IT Clifford Burroughs’ task was to lead the adoption of Lean principles, from waste-reduction to value stream mapping, across a wide range of business functions, including sales and marketing, finance and IT — a smart move, considering the many synergies he found between effective IT management and the Lean philosophy.

How did you, as IT director, come to be in charge of the company’s Lean program?

As far back as 2004, Lean was starting to be adopted in our individual business units and factories. For the most part, these initiatives bumped along as small, local projects in the UK only, but they were quite successful. When management became aware of the progress that was being made on a local level with Lean, Benoît Testard, our UK managing director at the time (and now Group CEO), asked me to draw all these early learnings from individual sites together and devise something that we soon started to refer to as “The UB Way,” in reference to the book The Toyota Way [by Dr. Jeffrey Liker], which catalogs how Toyota developed the Lean philosophy. I spent much of the second half of 2008 learning about Lean and developing The UB Way. Then, over the course of 2009 and 2010, we began re-engineering key business processes along Lean principles — not just in manufacturing, but also sales and marketing, finance and IT. The UB senior management team wanted to raise Lean to the enterprise level. We really believed that the entire organization had roles to play in simplification, reducing waste and so on.

What, for you, are the most important principles encompassed by the Lean philosophy and how do these apply to areas of UB outside of manufacturing?

The main thing is that we now think in terms of “value streams” and use value stream mapping — a well-established Lean technique — to look at how we can streamline processes. This means we work from the perspective of the customer who consumes our product. In this context, “value” is defined as any action, asset or capability at UB that goes into the manufacture of a particular product that has a value to our customer that they are willing to pay for. It requires input from multiple areas of the business to achieve a holistic view, so the critical thing is to get through the problem-solving and analysis fast, by getting the right people in the room to do the exercise. Previously, the manufacturing group was left to sail its own ship and to plead for sales and marketing to be involved. Now, there is a platform for that Lean conversation to take place on a company-wide basis.

What impact has Lean had on those non-manufacturing areas of UB’s business?

In sales and marketing, we’ve established Lean processes for managing incoming orders. So if a major supermarket comes to us and asks us for an extra 20,000 cases of a particular product, we need a fast way to verify that we can fulfill that order before we accept it. Here, Lean is vital in ensuring we don’t overcommit and then fail to deliver, which would destroy value for the customer. In finance, Lean principles have been applied to our procurement and financial reporting processes by our team of Lean “green belts,” who work to drive out unnecessary bottlenecks in these processes. And in the IT department, we’re busy “Leaning” our ITIL processes. We’ve been using ITIL for about 10 years, but we’re now looking at the framework we have in place and, for each process that has been defined, we ask a number of questions: Where’s the waste here? Where’s the value-add? It’s all about removing the former and keeping the latter.

In manufacturing, the results of Lean can be measured using metrics such as inventory reduction, labor cost, or machine utilization. Is it possible to apply similar metrics to other areas of the business?

Absolutely. In the IT department, we track how well we’re doing in reducing the root causes behind calls to our helpdesk, for example. In order to bring all our metrics together, we’ve established a tracking process that requires all of our sites and functional leads to record their progress against a company-wide “Lean Roadmap” each period. These periods are six weeks long and the roadmap is agreed every 12 months, for a three-year rolling period.

How well does Lean fit with your other role as an IT leader?

I think there’s something about IT people that helps them to inherently understand Lean, especially if business process re-engineering has played a big part in their working lives. And because Lean appeals to IT people, you’re pushing at an open door. From a CIO’s perspective, I’d say we are very well-equipped to work on any business improvement exercise, because we know our way around the business and generally have good basic problem-solving skills. There’s a natural fit. What’s more, I’m able to bring advocacy to the task. A CIO with good communication skills has to get out there and influence people in the wider workforce: while the tools and techniques that underpin Lean are relatively easy for an IT professional to understand and come to grips with, the biggest challenge is the change management aspect of moving a large workforce from a mass production-type environment to a more targeted approach. It’s a difficult switch in mindset for some people.

What’s the next step in UB’s Lean program?

There’s one big-ticket item on my agenda, which is “going global”: implementing Lean across every part of our business, including operations in India, Belgium, France and the Netherlands, and across all functions. That’s going to keep me pretty busy.