28 ISE Magazine | www.iise.org/ISEmagazine

Most companies treat lean as a tool set to im-

prove processes from the top down. However,

the top-down approach is costly, not scalable and

too slow to keep pace with the changes needed

to stay competitive.

The better way is to use lean as it was meant

to be: a culture and mindset where every employee is a lean

thinker and practitioner on the systems they work in every day.

Here we see how Chick-ﬁl-A transformed lean improve-

ments from being sourced by two dozen engineers to an army

of frontline lean thinkers among 150,000 team members.

Drawbacks to a top-down approach to lean

Like many companies, Chick-ﬁl-A began using lean as a tool

set to improve systems and processes from the top down. With

a small team of engineers, it developed and rolled out lean

modules, pareto-prioritized new processes designed to reduce

waste and increase value to the customer, with great successes.

Since 2014, Chick-ﬁl-A has grown in sales from $5.5 billion to

$10.6 billion in 2018 and its restaurant base has grown to more

than 2,000 locations.

I’m proud of the systems our engineers developed to increase

capacity, ensure fresh, hot entrées with innovative kanban

systems, and push the envelope of serving 300 cars per hour

through our drive-throughs, to name a few highlights.

However, with great growth comes greater problems to be

solved. As restaurants originally designed to do $2 million in

annual sales have grown to an average of $5.5 million, chal-

lenges multiply to maintain and improve key performance in-

dicators of food safety, product quality, speed of service, order

accuracy, customer satisfaction and restaurant capacity. In the

competitive quick-service restaurant industry, as in others, the

From lean modules

to a lean mindset

Chick-ﬁl-A’s success shows how leveraging your greatest asset speeds up cultural change

By David B. Reid

May 2019 | ISE Magazine 29

top-down approach where a few highly trained (i.e., expen-

sive) process engineers work to stay ahead of problems and de-

liver value on a variety of fronts has three critical disadvantages:

Costly. The top-down approach is costly. Our two dozen

engineers are highly skilled, highly paid, represent a signiﬁcant

cost to the company and, as such, are deployed to work on the

next biggest problems nobody knows how to solve. It wouldn’t

be good stewardship to add headcount for problems that can be

solved with a practical and systematic lean approach.

Not scalable. The company’s engineers shepherd a port-

folio of more than 40 prioritized projects. Each typically has

a three-year life cycle from idea to rollout, with large projects

in each phase of development. New projects replace those just

launched. It is a constant battle to not take on new work that

would dilute current efforts.

If we tackled every good idea that came across our desks, we

would get bogged down chasing too many opportunities and

wouldn’t execute any of them well. Even if we were able to

afford to double or triple the engineering staff, the complexity

of managing 120 projects (three times the current load) com-

peting for prototyping, validation and launch resources would

become a bottleneck in itself.

All the while, great ideas to solve local pain points are being

generated in the minds of franchisees (owner/operators) and

team members and implemented at the gemba. If there were a

way to share ideas across the chain, it would be inﬁnitely scal-

able because the more locations and team members there are as

we grow, the more labs and lean thinkers we have to improve

the process.

Too slow. Perhaps the worst failure of implementing a top-

down approach is that it is too slow. The competition gains

ground every day. New competitors with new ideas, more

agility and less overhead crop up overnight. Three years may

be a ﬁne development cycle for a project that will serve business

needs for 10 to 15 years, but it’s an eternity in the fast-changing,

customer-centric environments companies need to survive and

thrive within to stay competitive and relevant.

A model to reduce the eighth waste

In addition to these three value drawbacks, a top-down ap-

proach is antithetical to the very essence of lean. We deﬁne

the eighth waste as “your team members,” referring speciﬁcally

to underutilization of their creativity and skills (see Figure 1).

When process improvements come only from professional en-

gineers, we waste thousands of eyes, minds and hands working

in the process every day who could make local changes im-

mediately to create value, reduce waste and satisfy customers.

Our solution was to approach lean as it was meant to be: a

culture and mindset where every team member is a lean think-

er and practitioner. We followed a long-term process to shift

everyone in Chick-ﬁl-A, from leadership to frontline team

members, from viewing lean narrowly as a tool set for a few

to a broad mindset the entire company can use to continuously

improve every area of the business. The six steps to create a lean

culture are described in Figure 2.

Motivate people. The ﬁrst step is to motivate owner/op-

erators and team members to learn and apply lean principles to

their frontline work. This is easy; just start with a felt need by

having teams identify the pain points in their work. For owner/

operators, such a need is to grow their income potential. For

team members, the pain point is identiﬁed by the question:

“What makes your job hard?”

It’s worth mentioning how we ﬁnd the people to motivate.

At this point on the front end of our lean journey, we use a

FIGURE 1

A model to reduce the eighth waste

Getting team members on board with lean improvement efforts can start you in the right direction.

30 ISE Magazine | www.iise.org/ISEmagazine

From lean modules to a lean mindset

pull strategy. There are owner/operators, even

whole market teams, very interested in lean

and ask the Chick-ﬁl-A support staff to provide

training. When we deliver value, that generates

interest and invitations from others. This “pull”

from those motivated and interested results in the

best return on investment, in improvement re-

sults and in inﬂuencing a lean mindset across the

organization.

Teach lean. The second step is to teach lean

tools and principles to equip this army of lean

thinkers to solve problems and reduce waste.

Chick-ﬁl-A uses several platforms to teach lean.

Each serves to reinforce the others and provide

a path of broader and deeper application of lean

based on a team member’s unique interest in ap-

plying it.

First is a one-day “Lean Kickstart” course.

This eight-hour class starts with the deﬁnition of

lean and why we need it in our business. Then,

we teach the concepts of eight wastes, 5S, spa-

ghetti diagram and standard work in fun and

interactive ways with a focus on the restaurant

environment. Teams are challenged to watch for

wastes and pain points for themselves and cus-

tomers.

Finally, they are given some practical “next steps” (see Fig-

ure 2) and commission them to apply lean on the job. We give

everyone a copy of Paul Akers’ “2 Second Lean: How to Build a

Lean Culture and Have Fun at Work and at Home,” and a Chick-

ﬁl-A lean workbook, “Business Lean Participant Guide: System-

atic Application of LEAN (and other) Select Tools to Transcend Your

Performance” by Forrest Hillis, for further study. We celebrate

their training with a frameable “Lean Kickstart” certiﬁcate for

completing the course.

Set sandbox boundaries to safeguard your process. As

you can imagine, some risks come with deputizing everyone

in your organization to be a process improvement engineer.

Especially in the food service industry, we must take our com-

mitment to the well-being of the public seriously. The team

member (frontline worker) is at the gemba and, in many ways,

best equipped to improve the process. However, there are in-

stances when a team member doesn’t possess the specialized

knowledge or a big enough picture of the business to prevent

unintended consequences in a quest to eliminate waste.

The answer is to provide a clear set of boundaries where

team members can improve the process and where they can’t.

We call the area within bounds the “sandbox” they can “play

in.” The term “sandbox” comes from software development,

and refers to a testing environment where new code can be

developed and debugged without risk to the live production

environment (from “Sandbox” by Margaret Rouse, TechTar-

get 2018). Similarly, our lean sandbox consists of the safe realms

where team members can add value with lean without putting

anyone at risk from unintended consequences.

Our sandbox rules are simple: Anything that affects food

safety, people safety, product quality or equipment warranties

are off limits. We introduce this concept at the conclusion of

the Lean Kickstart when we show them our lean Facebook

FIGURE 2

Developing a lean mindset

The six key aspects of moving your workforce toward lean thinking.

FIGURE 3

Sandbox boundaries

Team members are advised to avoid innovative ideas that can

compromise product or worker safety, quality or equipment

warranties.

May 2019 | ISE Magazine 31

page for the ﬁrst time. Below is how we ﬂesh out the boundar-

ies (seen in Figure 3).

• Food safety. Team members can’t improve processes (with-

out testing approval from the support center) on anything

that holds, touches or transforms food. For example, they

can’t change the cook times or temperatures of food (this

also applies to thaw times and temperatures, hot and cold

holding times and temperatures and cool-down processes).

They also can’t change food-handling procedures. One

team member had an idea to put on two sets of gloves so

when his outer gloves got dirty, he could shed them quickly

and continue working. Clever, but we didn’t want to risk

cross-contamination from the outer to the inner gloves. We

drafted a post to describe the risk and attached it to the origi-

nal idea.

• People safety. Team members can’t do anything that puts

people in jeopardy. We’ve had cases where someone thinks

of a faster way to cut lemons, evacuate hot oil, run a machine

or store dry goods in underutilized space high out of reach.

We celebrate the creativity, but we respectfully reiterate that

team members’ safety is our highest priority. This particular

idea, we explain, increases the risk of an accident or injury.

• Product quality. Team members can’t change a recipe or

order of ingredients, ensuring that every Chick-ﬁl-A serves

a consistent, fully vetted and approved product. A resource-

ful team member once posted an idea on how he saved time

by ﬁlling a container with tap water from a faucet while he

added sugar and lemon juice, saving the time of letting the

water run by doing the steps in parallel. The problem was

that the order of ingredients – lemon juice, water and sugar –

is important to fully dissolve the sugar for our signature taste.

• Equipment warranty. Team members can’t do anything

that voids a manufacturer’s warranty. One idea that went vi-

ral was turning the vent shroud around on the bottom of the

Icedream machine so hot air vented

out the bottom went to the back of

the machine instead of the front. The

beneﬁt was that loose napkins or bags

wouldn’t get blown around by the exhausted airﬂow if they

fell on the ﬂoor. It sounds like a winner. However, the fan

and shroud were designed to cool the machine by evacuat-

ing hot air. When turned to the wall, the hot air stays in

the machine, wearing it out quicker than designed. A quick

check with the manufacturer conﬁrmed the original design

was intentional and would void the warranty. Again, an in-

formational posting along with the idea curbed the change

as quickly as it spread.

After these examples, it may seem these four rules provide a

small sandbox in which to practice lean, but that’s not the case.

Across 2,000 locations with varying layouts and product mixes,

and more than 100,000 owner/operators and team members

with different pain points, the opportunities to apply lean prin-

ciples to reduce waste, add value and satisfy the customer are

almost inﬁnite.

Build a lean community to share improvements. Af-

ter introducing our sandbox boundaries, the next step is invit-

ing our new lean thinkers to subscribe to and post in Chick-ﬁl-

A’s chainwide lean Facebook page. This is a Facebook group of

lean thinkers at the restaurant level who share ideas and applica-

tions with others in the chain.

The number of “likes” and comments a post gets are indica-

tions of how popular an idea is. Since May 2017, more than

4,500 content entries have been posted roughly correspond-

ing to 200 unique ideas; the difference between 200 and 4,500

is discussion on the merits of the idea and often reﬁnements

to the initial improvement. Sometimes, the comments serve

as self-policing, as other team members poke holes in an idea

and bring up reasons why it shouldn’t be done. These 4,500

posts have been “liked” more than 8,000 times. Each “like” is

alerting and tagging others to make sure they implement this

“liked” idea in their restaurant.

A ﬁeld at the bottom of a receipt

serves to remind customers to

scan the app.

Improvement ideas are welcomed,

but product quality and safety

remain a priority.

32 ISE Magazine | www.iise.org/ISEmagazine

From lean modules to a lean mindset

Figure 4 lists the ﬁve most popular lean ideas as evidenced by

numbers of “likes” and comments received. The most popular

post by far has been a great convenience to customers and a

time-saver to cashiers. We rolled out our CFA One Mobile app

with a feature to reward free treats for the more food you buy.

You have to scan your mobile phone app to claim credit toward

a free treat. When you pay with your phone, this happens au-

tomatically. However, if you pay with cash or credit card, you

still get credit toward free treats if you scan the app.

Yet customers were forgetting to scan. Cashiers were having

to tell each customer individually how to go to a website to

enter their receipt info if they forgot to scan at the time of pur-

chase. While this happens, other customers wait in line.

One lean thinker realized if we put the “forgot to scan?”

info at the bottom of the receipt (see photo on Page 31), it

would better serve the customer from having to remember said

website and save time by the cashier simply saying the bottom

of your receipt tells how to get credit for your last purchase.

Genius! Needless to say, this post went viral among managers

and cashiers who answered this question multiple times per day.

Other popular ideas include kanbaning low-use dry goods,

5S projects (see Figure 5) to shorten travel time, setup time or

search time, and myriad other labor-saving ideas.

Note that a couple of the projects in Figure 4 get dangerous-

ly close to the food safety and product quality boundaries set,

namely the multi-biscuit mold and the peppermint dispenser.

When a team member welds a smallware to be used on food,

it hasn’t been vetted by the National Sanitation Foundation to

make sure the welds are with food-safe materials and strong

enough to keep loose parts or particles from falling off and con-

taminating food. Similarly, the convenience of an automatic

peppermint dispenser doesn’t account for exact portioning and

may adversely affect the taste or food cost of a milkshake.

In these cases, I have an engineer assigned to regularly moni-

tor the lean Facebook page for good ideas as well as those that

violate boundaries. We have owner/operators who adminis-

trate the lean Facebook page whom we alert to the problem

issues. They politely point out the weaknesses of these ideas and

issue a kind “cease-and-desist” message.

But we also celebrate the thinking, and when appropriate,

let team members know we are considering how to make their

idea work. In fact, the multi-biscuit cutter idea became a proj-

ect for our engineering team. We developed a rolling biscuit

cutter that is about to roll out chainwide thanks to a lean think-

er making biscuits who thought there must be a better way.

Before you think it seems risky to allow team members to

share ideas that haven’t been vetted, consider the alternative. If

we didn’t have the Facebook page as a safe place to share ideas,

a team member likely would have thought of the innovation,

made it and perhaps shared it with other restaurants. We would

FIGURE 5

5S steps

Team members undertook these methods to create efﬁciency.

FIGURE 4

Most popular lean ideas

These are among ideas introduced by Chick-ﬁl-A team members since May 2017.

May 2019 | ISE Magazine 33

have had no visibility into the fact a new smallware was being

used. This way, we are often the ﬁrst to know when something

may be a problem, and are also the ﬁrst to know when someone

has a great idea we should accelerate (in a food-safe, people-safe

and product-quality way).

A saying applies here: “we would rather have to restrain

mustangs than to kick mules.” I’d much rather have an army

of 150,000 lean thinkers whom we occasionally have to rein in

than to waste their talent out of the fear of the unknown.

Celebrate wins. Everybody loves to be recognized for a

job well done. It values the individual and sets the tone and

expectation for what we want to produce more of. We have

several ways we celebrate lean wins. We celebrate the comple-

tion of a Lean Kickstart course with a certiﬁcate and ceremony

commissioning lean thinking from our new grads. We also

host contests on the lean Facebook page. We have often run a

monthlong contest that offers a speciﬁc problem we’d like help

to solve. We’ve held contests asking for the best idea to im-

prove food safety, order accuracy and store closing and opening

times. The criteria for the contest are that whoever gets the

most “likes” for an idea in 30 days wins.

This creates a fun, competitive environment and a lot of

ideas in a short amount of time, gets everyone thinking about

problems important to our business and sometimes produces a

breakthrough idea. The prize is generally recognition for the

idea in a handwritten thank-you note from someone high in

leadership at Chick-ﬁl-A and a $100 Amazon gift card.

And of course, we recognize great ideas we steal. There was

an entire article on the Chick-ﬁl-A internal website ofﬁcially

giving all restaurants the idea to add the “forgot to scan” text to

the bottom of the receipt. Credit was given to the team mem-

ber who posted that idea.

And when we elevated the multi-biscuit cutter idea to an

engineering project and came up with the biscuit roller, we

did a video thanking the team member who had the original

idea, giving her a stake in the success that would make biscuit

makers’ jobs better.

Celebrating “wins” honors the lean thinkers who use their

talents to create success for Chick-ﬁl-A, and it also builds aware-

ness and participation in the lean culture we want to create.

Provide paths for deeper lean learnings. All of the

progress we’ve talked about up to this point is the result of a

one-day investment in lean. We also offer paths for those who

want to grow their lean skills further.

We maintain a lean resource library website for any team

member interested in learning more. I often travel with a cou-

ple of giveaway copies of Akers’ “Second Lean” or “The Lean

Six Sigma Pocket Toolbook” to pass on to a team member curious

about process improvement. I even gave away my stopwatch on

one occasion when I wanted to inspire a team member to keep

observing and measuring in his/her restaurant.

Our lean department offers a three-day kaizen event over

three weeks for restaurant teams who want to accelerate their

improvement. The ﬁrst day is introductory teaching of lean

tools and how a kaizen event works. The next meeting is to

pick a project and gather data. The ﬁnal meeting is to tabulate

results, make the changes permanent and celebrate wins. As

you can imagine, this is a signiﬁcant investment to have a lean

facilitator available to travel to restaurants, but in each case, it

has also yielded signiﬁcant results.

Finally, Chick-ﬁl-A has a yearlong Lean365 course for own-

er/operators who want to go deeper. One day a month, they

learn time study, standard work, quick changeover (SMED),

error prooﬁng and other lean skills to take back to their teams.

We are dreaming of creating a two-year lean certiﬁcation for

team members. In addition to having a great ﬁrst job, we envi-

sion also intentionally imparting the most practical job skills

training for the 21st century world. What if every company

taught lean to its young workforce? Even when workers leave

for other opportunities, we’ll be cross-pollinating lean training

around the world.

The full circle will be to train team members how to con-

duct lean kickstarts. Our lean transformation will be complete

when each restaurant teaches lean thinking just as it teaches

how to assemble a chicken sandwich and say, “My pleasure!”

This is the six-step process for how we’ve transformed lean

improvements from being sourced from about two dozen en-

gineers to an army of frontline lean thinkers among 100,000-

plus team members. If you want to keep your business growing

while others react slowly, you need to accelerate continuous

and breakthrough improvement, reduce waste to increase value

and ﬁnd new ways to satisfy customers. Your best chance of

thriving in business is to cultivate a lean mindset into your or-

ganization’s culture. I highly recommend our six-step process

outlined here to accelerate your organization’s lean journey. 

David Reid, PE, is a business-minded IE manager in the Restaurant

Experience Team at Chick-ﬁl-A Inc. in Atlanta and an IISE member.

He has worked with Chick-ﬁl-A since 2014. He has a passion to share

lean concepts and skills with the next generation of leaders and is avail-

able to speak, train or consult.

A team member’s idea for an improved biscuit cutter led to

a revised product.