Lean Manufacturing: No Muss, No Fuss

Posted on26. Apr, 2009 by carolesf.

What is Lean Manufacturing all about?   (We’ll get to the closet later.) 

Lean Manufacturing

is one of several related terms that describe similar systems.  Just-In-Time, World Class Manufacturing, Stockless Production, and Demand Flow Technology are a few of these other terms.  Broadly, all of these concepts focus on doing the bare minimum necessary to produce the product required by customers. 

In other words, don’t order extra inventory and then have to pay for facilities to store it and people to manage it.  Don’t over-design a product and spend countless engineering and design hours figuring out how to shoehorn 10 pounds of sand into a 5-pound bag.  (All the customer wants is 5 pounds, and they won’t pay more for 10.)  These things are wasteful.  The customer won’t pay for them; why should your company? 

Lean Manufacturing had its roots in Henry Ford’s system of mass production.  Ford was one of the first and most famous industrialists who paid careful attention to work flow and process standardization.  Before Ford, automobiles were an extreme luxury, since it cost so much for craftsmen to produce each one by hand.  Ford’s express goal was to create a market for the automobile.  He achieved this by reducing per-unit production costs and paying his factory workers enough so that they could afford to buy the cars they were building.  It worked.  America’s love affair with the automobile was born.

After World War II, Japanese auto producer Toyota admired the American system of production.  But Toyota’s leadership realized they did not have the capital or other resources needed to implement a process as centralized as Ford’s.  So Toyota set about trying to streamline everything related to producing cars.  The result was a system that became famous in the early 1990′s, in part as a result of a book entitled “The Machine That Changed the World” by James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos. 

So what are these revolutionary principles?    

(1) Specify value — as the customer sees it.

(2) Map the value stream, identifying value-add and non-value-add costs — and get rid of the latter.

(3) Make the remaining process steps flow.  This usually means empowering the workforce, pushing down responsibility for a decision to the right level in the organization.

(4) Let the customer pull the desired product through the production process.  Never build in advance of an order.

(5) And finally, don’t stop there.  Pursue perfection through continual improvement.  In other words, the job is never done.

In order for your production facility to support this approach, it is often the case that the physical plant must be transformed.  Lean Manufacturing prescribes the Five S process to achieve this: Sort, Straighten, Sweep, Standardize, and Sustain.  These actions can be taken in relation to the inventory but also to tools and equipment.  The goal is that age-old saying, “A place for everything and everything in its place.”  If you don’t need it — don’t hang onto it.  If you do need it, make sure you know where it is, and whether or not it’s in working order. 

So, what about that closet?  Well, the first three S’s are accomplished fairly easily, often in one major effort — like spring-cleaning a closet.  But without the last two S’s, it doesn’t take much time before things start to look like the same cluttered mess they were before.  Do you already have a stock of Widget A?  They didn’t get put where they were supposed to be, and something else got put there instead, so you don’t know.  Well, you need Widget A to produce your output, so you order more.  Bingo!  Wasted inventory, wasted time, wasted money. 

Lean Manufacturing requires constant discipline to avoid slipping back into pre-lean, wasteful habits.  The price of Lean is constant vigilance.  But if you’re successful in maintaining that vigilance — you can be a world-beater.

Welcome back to Lean Six Sigma Source! Thanks for your continued support.

Continue Reading