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1. Introduction

Lean management is a management philosophy that aims at a continuous improvement of a company’s value creation capability by engaging all employees. In order to follow this philosophy, the core idea of lean management is to reduce any kind of waste (Womack and Jones, 2003). Adopting this philosophy throughout a company is supposed to be positively correlated with higher efficiency (Dahlgaard and Dahlgaard-Park, 2006). Manufacturing companies were the first ones to apply lean management (Mefford, 1993). However, service industries and service-related departments in manufacturing companies are increasingly guided by the ideas of lean management (Moyano-Fuentes and Sacristan-Diaz, 2012).

Especially financial services companies are interested in lean management as many of them are in a difficult situation due to strict governmental regulations, increasing worldwide competition driven by non-financial companies (e.g. Paypal) and changing customer behaviour (Staikouras and Koutsomanoli-Fillipaki, 2006; de Koning et al., 2008). To react properly financial services companies need functioning organisational structures. But banks and insurance companies often experience difficulties in applying the principles of lean management (Bortolotti and Romano, 2012). A one-to-one transfer of these principles from manufacturing to the financial services sector is not suitable due to the following differences between production companies and banks and insurance providers:

  • Nature/type of goods and services: banks and insurance providers offer predominantly information-processing services, i.e. services that collect, produce and process information (Davies, 1994). Products resulting from such information-processing service processes are generally not tangible (even though employees process tangible documents) and, therefore, remain somewhat vague for both customers and employees.

  • Production process: production in information-processing services can be performed independently from a specific location as digital data can be sent around the world within seconds. The type of work is different to manufacturing where typically a tangible product is assembled. Generic tasks for information-processing services range from consultancy over processing transactions to mostly administrative work (Davies, 1994).

  • Customer integration: a core element of information-processing service processes is the direct involvement of customers in the service delivery, unlike in manufacturing industries (Corrêa et al., 2007). In fact, customers have to participate at certain points in time during the service process so that the service can be carried out (Leyer and Moormann, 2012). The service delivery will be delayed if the required...

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