Lean Manufacturing: Improving process effectiveness by reducing wastes

Its origin:

Lean Manufacturing is a set of practices which aims at making a manufacturing process of a company cost-effective and improves customer satisfaction by enabling it to achieve faster delivery times. Lean Manufacturing has had a complete evolvement journey to its name, starting from the 19th century till date. It has gone through various stages of design and development, the most prominent one being Toyota's Lean Integration to their manufacturing processes.

How does it achieve this?

Lean Manufacturing achieves this objective by reducing wastes of the production process. Various methods that encapsulate the spirit of Lean Manufacturing are - 5S, Cell Setup Reduction, Continuous Process Improvement, Pull Production, Just in time production and last but not the least, Kaizen. Various elements of Lean Manufacturing integrate themselves into one unit forming a Lean System.

What are the advantages to a business?

Any business which implements Lean Manufacturing techniques on its processes is sure to get competitive cost advantages out of it.

By reduction of wastes from the production processes, the business can hope to reduce inventory and inventory management which is acknowledged as one of the main reasons for slowing down of production.

By implementing Continuous Process Improvement, a business can continuously improve their processes all the time by the process of knowledge creation. In a production or a manufacturing life cycle, knowledge creation is considered to be the best strategy for building of a knowledge base.

Cellular layouts minimize the inventory and transportation of the product from one stage to the other.

Last but not the least, implementing lean techniques as a lean system on production processes would mean smoother process flow, effective team work and production of quality goods in a timely manner.

All this means, the customer does not have to pay for anything that he does not have to. Timely production of the product as per the customer specifications will surely increase the customer satisfaction levels.

Who can implement Lean techniques?

Lean techniques impact processes which are mission critical to a company - production processes. It is extremely important that business owners allow only professionals who have working knowledge and experience in Lean techniques to implement them on the production processes.

If your company is struggling with the presence of wastes in your business processes and long production times, the processes would need immediate improvement and lean techniques is the most optimal way. If you do not have the resources to implement lean techniques, you can get this done with the help of Lean Manufacturing consultants or train your resources with the help of lot of simulation tools or a training program.