Lean Manufacturing - Overview

Lean Manufacturing - is it a way of life in your company?

Lean philosophy is a way of life that all companies, manufacturing or service should be trying to implement into their organisations.

Many companies today are utilising Lean thinking either on its own or in conjunction with Six Sigma, but regardless of size or industry you should start to embrace the Lean way of life.  It has helped thousands of companies worldwide to dramatically improve their businesses by removing the waste from their processes. 

Lean focuses on identifying waste in all processes and then using some simple tools to eliminate that waste.  Waste is classified as anything that doesn’t add value from a customers view point to a process. 

For example the customer doesn’t want to pay for you to build up work in process, finished goods or raw material inventory but indirectly we make them pay for it.  The customer doesn’t want to pay for products being moved around your factory / office or the time your staff take looking for parts or information but through our inefficient processes we do.  This all affects the cost of our products, our sales, turnover and profit. 

The amazing truth is that when you start to analysis your processes most have over 80% waste in them.  We have studied processes in large and small companies all over the world and found this to be the case, even world class companies still have vast amounts of waste that needs to be removed from their processes.  Some examples of waste are shown below

Waste examples

·         Looking for parts or tools

·         Waiting to be told what to do next

·         Waiting for information or parts to enable them to start the next task

·         Making parts or collecting information that is not going to be used or sold straight away 

·         Waiting for a computer to start up or a printer to load

·         Waiting to get on to a machine – queues at photocopies

·         Machine downtime

·         Time spent dealing with customer queries about late deliveries or complaints or something we got wrong with an order

·         Time spent retyping information into a computer system

·         Time spent relearning a skill or working out how something works

·         Time wasted waiting for meetings to start or over run

·         Space used up for inventory, obsolete stock and work in progress

·         Manufacturing or doing tasks in quantities greater than the customer ordered

·         Paying to store, insure, count and look after inventory that you don’t need straight away

·         All obsolete stock

·         The cost of reworking anything that has been done wrongly first time

·         The cost of reworking something because there has been a change in the engineering or customer requirements

·         Not having a production flow which is simple and logical having to move things around and produce in large batches

·         Any movement round your site or production area or office – travel takes time and cost to move things around

·         Scrapping anything from reports to products

How can you calculate how much waste you have in your processes?  Think about the answers to the following questions and you can start to add up how much not having Lean is costing you.

1.   Time – How much time on average each day do your people waste doing the following types of activities?

o   Looking for parts or tools

o   Waiting to be told what to do next

o   Waiting for information or parts to enable them to start the next task

o   Making parts or collecting information that is not going to be used or sold straight away 

o   Waiting for a computer to start up or a printer to load

o   Waiting to get on to a machine – queues at photocopies

o   Time spent dealing with customer queries about late deliveries or complaints or something we got wrong with an order

o   Time spent retyping information into a computer system

o   Time spent relearning a skill or working out how something works

o   Time wasted waiting for meetings to start or over run

2.   Inventory – How much money do we have tied up in inappropriate inventory due to poor planning, forecasting and having to manufacture or do things in large batches? 

3.   Space -How much space is taken up on the shop floor and in the stored for obsolete inventory, the wrong inventory or work in progress?

4.   Obsolete inventory - What was the cost of last year’s obsolete inventory?

5.   Lead-time – how much more could you sell if your lead-times where 50% of what they are today?

6.   Capacity - If you could increase capacity on your bottleneck machine how much more could you sell?

7.   Rework, scrap - Last year how much scrap material did you produce and how much time was wasted doing rework? Last year how much time was wasted doing rework?

8.   Machine downtime – how much more could you produce from your machines if they had reduced downtime?

Most people therefore find that there are massive saving to be had by removing waste from their processes.  Lean provides us with some simple methods, tools and techniques to try and remove the waste and increase customer service, reduce lead-times and improve profitability

If you would like to know more then come along to one of out Lean overview courses or give us a ring for more detailed training, coaching and consultancy