Lean Manufacturing

This document describes our personal view of the meaning, principles and some of the problems of Lean Manufacturing and what it should encapsulate. It encompasses the works of Feigenbaum, Deming, Juran, Shingo, Taguchi, Ishikawa, Imai, Peters and of course our own experience. It encapsulates the elimination of waste, total quality (TQM), Just in Time, supplier integration, automation, team working, empowerment, behaviour, preventive maintenance (TPM), delivery frequency, selling techniques, new product introduction, and agile manufacturing.

Links to other best practices and training at bottom of page

Based originally on the Toyota Production System (TPS), "lean" manufacturing explained by Womack Jones and Roos, Imai, and others, provides a radically different way of running manufacturing. However we feel that some important aspects particularly behavioural aspects make it incomplete. We would define a truly lean philosophy as including:

Culture. (See "Culture Development Methods & World Class Change Management")

Structure (See "Organisational Redesign")

Systems. There are a huge range of techniques and systems (Many of which we include in our range of ongoing improvement workshops, which can:

(Many of these techniques are also covered in "Previous Techniques of the Week" available on request)

A more recent definition of quality management based on our latest research & our experience is discussed in more detail in "Six Steps to Near-Perfect Quality". Also more recently in our Business Process Reengineering training we define the "six drivers of performance" which we will cover in a future article.

There are however dangers in the strict application of the techniques above to supply chains. Without agility (See Agile Manufacturing) leanness can lead to shortages. We have encountered several examples of this. However most of these examples are due to the faulty operation of the control systems rather than the features of the control system itself. The three biggest reasons for failure are that a Lean process needs to operate in an environment that contains:

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Finally here is a question for you:

How much stock is required to buffer two successive, adjacent, processes of equal capacity with 99.9% reliability working at their capacity? (It rarely gets better than this!)

Answer

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The following further best practice articles were also mentioned in this paper:

Lean Supply Chains

JIT

Six steps to near-perfect quality

Kanban

Agile Manufacturing

Demand Management

New Product Introduction

Culture Development Methods & World Class Change Management

Focused Improvement Systems (continuous improvement)

BPR (Organizational Redesign)

Introduction to Benchmarking

Previous Techniques of the Week

5 why’s

Pareto analysis

Previous Best Practice of the Week 038: "Product Design Parameters"

Previous Best Practice of the Week 041: "21 Barriers to Lean And Agile"

Previous Best Practice of the Week 036: Collaborative Engineering (or why concurrent engineering is only half of the story)

The following public training courses and in-house workshops provides solutions to Lean Manufacturing:

M20 Lean Business Overview

M21 Lean Manufacturing Detail

OM01 "Organising & Engaging the Team"

OM03 Organising & Managing The Workplace

D03 Six Steps To Near Perfect Quality

D04 Advanced Quality Management

You may also be interested in the following workshops which are associated with lean manufacturing:

M01 Designing, Implementing & Operating Kanban Systems

M10 Simple Stock Control

M11 Simple Ways To Maximise Output & Workflow

M15 Agile Manufacturing Overview

SSC01 Tools Techniques & Modern Trends in Supply Chain Management

SSC04 Production Planning & Control Back To Basics

SSC07 Strategic Supply Chain Management

S02 Business Process Re-engineering

S03 Vision Of A World Class Organisation

S04 Strategic Capacity Management

S08 Programme Management

S05 World Class Change Management

Ongoing improvement

C01 Focused Improvement Systems (FIS)

To discuss your consulting or training needs with one of our independent consultants or trainers please Contact Us.

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©SM Thacker & Associates (Consultancy and Training Specialists) Original November 2000, Version 9 February 2008