Everyone knows by now that you can get glasses “in about an hour.” I read about them recently in a magazine, this was the quote:

“…company was founded and flourished because two entrepreneurs discovered a secret… before LensCrafters, buying a new pair of glasses involved… waiting several days or weeks for the prescription to be filled at a lab. The secret was that it really took the labs only one hour to do the work.”

I don’t know if that is really a secret if you understand lean thinking. When you look at the percentage of a total process cycle time (from order to customer receipt), you know that a very small amount is actually value added. This percentage is typically even less than 1% of the time. 1 hour of VA time (and I’m sure not all 60 minutes are value added) out of 5 days to get the glasses, that’s 1/(5 * 24) = 0.8% value-added.

This was true in eye glasses, until the innovation of placing the glasses lab right on site at the store. You can even get an eye exam right there and avoid an extra trip or drive. How very lean! Does LensCrafters have a faster glasses-making machine? I doubt it. They just remove the waiting time and transportation delays between you and the lab.

I wonder what other industries currently have such low value added time? It seems like there would be a competitive or entrepreneurial opportunity to compete based on speed and lean principles. Any ideas?

About LeanBlog.org: Mark Graban is a consultant, author, and speaker in the “lean healthcare” methodology, focused on improving quality and patient safety, improving access, reducing costs, and fully engaging healthcare professionals. He is also the Chief Improvement Officer for KaiNexus.