Lean Manufacturing

Lean organizations apply a three-pronged approach that:

• eliminates waste
• ensures quality
• embraces employee involvement

Understanding Lean principles

By applying and following Lean principles, you will be able to:

• Define value from the customer's perspective

  • A Lean enterprise focuses on product value to the consumer. It identifies value added activities, and eliminates non-value added activities.

  • A Lean enterprise is driven by customer needs, without artificial boundaries such as minimum re-order points, quality control checks, clerical data entry, and so on.

• Identify and map the value stream

  • A Lean enterprise identifies material and information flows that are currently required to deliver a product or service.

  • This activity highlights bottlenecks, handoffs, lead-time, and where inventory lives, moves, and is used.

  • The result is a pictorial of your current processes from start to finish and all parts in-between. The key is to focus on the 65 to 95% of non-value added actions that occur.

• Reduce or eliminate waste and improve flow

  • A Lean enterprise eliminates all activities that utilize resources but that do not create value.

  • A Lean enterprise satisfies the needs of the customer by performing only those activities that add value in the eyes of the customer.

  • In a Lean enterprise, waste in the value stream is any activity for which the customer is not willing to pay, since that activity adds no value to the product or service, and often consumes resources.

  • Waste exists in all parts of the business - from the front office to the factory. Lean analysis results in redefining the current value stream to one that includes only value adding activities.

• Pull from the customer

  • Information and material is pulled based on customer demand, rather than being based on arbitrary or pre-defined inventory levels.

• Pursue Perfection

  • Continue to perfect your Lean implementation by returning to Step 1 and repeating this process for a cycle of continuous improvement.

Seven wastes to eliminate

From a Lean enterprise perspective, there are seven types of waste that should be eliminated in order to increase profits and increase efficiency:

• Stop overproduction or early production

  • Both result in the production of unnecessary products and materials, and the waste of material, resources, and personnel.

  • Lean analysis helps to identify and eliminate the production of units that are no longer used, or that are redundant to the product being produced.

• Manage inventory

  • Lean inventory management methods will prevent the holding or purchasing of unnecessary raw materials, performance of unnecessary work-in-progress, or the production and storage of unnecessary product.

• Streamline transportation

  • By streamlining transportation of materials, you can reduce multiple handling of materials, delays in material handling, as well as unnecessary handling.

• Optimize motion and actions

  • Lean analysis reveals unproductive actions and motions performed by your personnel. For example, unnecessary trips to inventory to collect parts could be eliminated by storing the parts closer to where they are actually used.

• Reduce waiting times

  • Waiting for products, personnel, or parts all result in wasted time. Idle time is time during which value is not added to the product.

• Reduce or eliminate production of defective units

  • Lean analysis helps to identify errors in the production process and helps eliminate the production of defective units that cannot be used or sold.

• Reduce or stop over-processing

  • Lean analysis reveals unnecessary steps or work elements that do not add value to the work or product.

How does Lean affect my work force?

The transformation of an organization into a Lean workplace generally has positive effects upon its work force:

• Employees are empowered and involved in the process by the formation of teams, training, and new responsibilities for multiple specialized tasks.

• Workers become responsible for ensuring quality of produced product, and have the responsibility and ability to immediately fix the problem, or if unable to fix the problem, to halt the production line. This ensures that quality product is going out the door.

• Empowered equipment operators are assigned primary responsibility for basic maintenance since they are in the best position to identify malfunctions and problems.

• Workers become multi-skilled and able to perform many jobs. This does require that they attend, and are provided with, adequate training for each of these positions.

What can you expect when you go Lean?

Positive results can be experienced across many categories. By implementing Lean principles, you can expect to:

• create a culture of continuous improvement
• decrease manufacturing cycle times
• eliminate waste
• empower workers
• experience higher profits
• improve cash flow
• increase production capacity
• maximize flow
• meet customer requirements
• minimize inventory
• partner with suppliers
• pull from demand
• reduce production costs

Date Updated: Jan 15, 2008
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