While Lean Six Sigma tools are often used as business tools, they can easily be implemented to help with our personal everyday issues. On previous blogs, we have showed examples on how Lean tools can be translated to help us straighten out our garages, home offices and help with spring cleaning.
These very same tools can help us save on our shopping needs as well —whether it’s shopping for groceries, clothes or even a major appliance or car. Before we continue, let’s review some of the major causes of waste in business.
- Excess inventory
- Deviations
- Poor quality
Mindful Spending
These same issues are the cause of our financial shortages. How many times have you bought something that you really don’t need? This creates too much personal “inventory,” which creates clutter. Now you can’t really see what you have and run the risk of buying the same items again, thus creating a vicious cycle.
Deviations, in what we buy, means purchasing something you wouldn’t really use or eat or wear under normal circumstances. Once again, this creates cash flow issues and waste, because you won’t use it.
In the hopes of saving money, you buy cheaply made products that will eventually fall apart. The number 1 rule is, what you buy must add value to your well-being in some way, otherwise do not buy it.
Lean Core Principles
Focus: On key issue(s) — in this case, your cash flow
Improve: By not purchasing anything that is not of value to you
Sustain: By monitoring how you spend and when you do most of your spending
Honor: Your commitment to the process, and to your goal of improving your cash flow
In business as in life, the principles are the same but the situation might be different. There are certain times when a well made expensive article of clothing is the right call, simply because it adds value to a given situation. Pick and choose your situations wisely.
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