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Lean Manufacturing will improve your competitive position

Many manufacturing companies focus primarily on improving production efficiency by reducing costs. What is value from their customers' perspective is frequently lost from sight.

Lean thinking strives to understand what your customers truely value, and then organise your activities seamlessly to deliver that value.

By making non-value adding activities visible and creating continuous flow, many companies have achieved spectacular results:

• Productivity increase of 20% in 4 months;
• Manufacturing lead time reduction of 20% in 4 weeks;
• Reduction of work in progress by 57% in 10 months;
• Increase in delivery reliability from 35% to 95% in 5 months;
• Reduction of stock by 18% in 6 months.

Following are an extract of tools and techniques to apply Lean Thinking:

• Value Stream Mapping (VSM)
• 5S, Standard Work, Visual Management
• Levelled production (Heijunka)
• Pull production planning; Kanban systems
• Kaizen: Small Group Activity (SGA) improvement teams
• Set-up time reduction (SMED)
• Customer/ Supplier partnerships (Supply Chain Management)

Lean Thinking will not work by only applying the tools and techniques. Your organisation needs an inspirational long term vision, a performance based management system and your leaders to demonstrate the right set of Lean mindsets and behaviors.

Tools

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