Understanding Lean Manufacturing

By Author: Anthea Johnson
Total Articles: 12
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The industry’s concern to supply a product or a service with excellence has opened an innumerable list of actions that need to be directed: improving productivity, reducing wastes, and training the personnel, and create a culture of quality. Mass production is one of the essential qualities of manufacturing and it should focus on the performance of production processes, a distraction can result in bad quality products. It is important to have senior management that cares about providing world-class processes and high-quality products, these companies spend resources and time to update their staff on various methods and tools such as lean manufacturing.

The tools of lean manufacturing are called lean tools which include 5’s, Kanban, Kaizen, Kaikaku, Jidoka, Heinkunka, Push and Pull System, Poka-Yoke, SMED, Standard Work, TPM, Value Stream Mapping, Visual Factory, Manufacturing Cells, etc. Also the administrative staff updates communication, supervision, time management, teamwork skills between senior management and members of the organization. 

Lean manufacturing is the “systematic elimination of waste”. ...
... It is a Japanese method focused on 3M’s of Japanese words: Muda (waste), Mura (inconsistency), and Muri (unreasonableness). Generally, the waste can be divided into seven categories: Delays, early and excess production, making defective items, inventory, movement and transport, poor process design, and inefficient performance of a process.

Lean manufacturing is a combination of multiple tools to help to remove activities that do not add value to the process, service, and product by increasing the value of each activity, aimed to improve operations, and eliminate waste. Lean manufacturing focuses to reorganize the processes of waste reduction, minimizing steps, and thereby reducing costs.

There are subsystems (tools) in the lean manufacturing system and these subsystems are used to remove waste in organizations. The objectives of lean manufacturing are as given below:

Specification of the value for the customer
Identification of all actions required to bring the product from being a concept to being a launch, from order to delivery, from raw material to the customer’s hands
Removing any action that does not add value and align every action to add value as required by the customer
Analyzing the results and start the evaluation process again.
Today there is a new evolution in manufacturing and it is directed by two factors: (a) The sustained growth of the economy and (b) The old management styles are lacking to work with employees without multi-task training. Many organizations are adapting to lean manufacturing processes setting solid goals as given below:

Manufacturing of the quality product
Cost reduction projects
Total employee involvement
Cultural approaches
The concept of lean manufacturing is regarded as a significant departure from the automated factory so popular in recent years. Rather than batch manufactured for stock, the products are manufactured one at a time in response to the requirements of customers. The goal is to produce the required quantity only and no more. In today’s environment of manufacturing, assembly work is routinely characterized by constantly diminishing batch sizes and short production cycles. While the variety of models and product types increases.

An approach of lean manufacturing techniques depends much on flexibility and workplace organization, these techniques are also worthy of investigation as they remove large capital outlays for dedicated machinery until automation becomes absolutely necessary.

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