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Lean vs agile is the quintessential question businesses often find themselves in dilemmas about. Modern organizations have diverse processes that are highly variable. Ideally, businesses should be using both lean and agile approaches in their processes, based on their nature. The combined approach, instead of deciding between lean and agile, is often the most beneficial one in the interest of customer satisfaction, cost reduction, higher sustainability, and greater profits.

How Does Lean Work for Businesses?

Lean is a time-tested methodology that has its roots in the manufacturing sector. Lean focuses on the reduction of waste from processes and accelerating the delivery of products to the market. At the core of lean is the concept of waste, which is an entity that does not contribute any value to customers. Wastes take numerous forms including overproduction, waiting times, machine movements, storage and inventory losses, and inefficiencies in the disposal of wastes, etc.

Lean reduces inefficiencies and creates products in higher volumes. This improves customer satisfaction, as customers get timely deliveries and the products are optimized to serve customers best.

Lean encourages open communication between teams and creates a people-centric culture. Customer-centricity is also a defining trait of this approach.

How Does the Agile Methodology Function?

Agile is based on the philosophy of continuous improvement. Businesses learn from past experiences and incorporate best practices into production. Cross-collaboration is an absolute must, and daily meetings are encouraged. Agile creates products in small batches and delivers it to the customers in the shortest time possible. Customer feedback is captured and then entered into the design phase to optimize the product to better meet customer needs. Agile is well-equipped to handle ever-changing market conditions and customer requirements.

Agile also makes businesses more adaptive to highly fluctuating conditions on the market front.

Lean vs Agile: Which One Should You Choose for Your Business?

Businesses often have a hard time choosing between Lean and Agile. Each approach has unique advantages of its own. While lean creates high-volume products in the shortest time, agile creates products in small volumes and tests the waters before optimizing the products again. Continuous improvement is key. 

While lean enhances productivity manifold, agile helps execute processes in the fastest manner possible to respond to changes, both expected and unexpected. 

Lean creates minimal waste by reducing all process inefficiencies. On the other hand, agile is more focused on teamwork and customer requirements. Used together, both approaches make businesses more resilient and profitable, as the combined approach cuts process costs and helps make processes more adaptive to changing conditions.

New products can be created faster with lean, while agile helps constantly refine the scope of the product and improves it constantly until it delivers the highest possible value to customers. Agile adds flexibility to lean while lean brings productivity to agile. Together, they work hand in hand for the best results.