Implementing Lean ManufacturingImplementing Lean Manufacturing in your production processes would mean that you have taken one step towards reducing production costs and increasing customer satisfaction levels of your brand. What this also means is that a lot of steps and activities which were considered as necessary for your production process, could also be possibly identified as wastes and which could be knocked off the process in itself. How does one implement Lean Manufacturing techniques on a production process? Remember, Lean Manufacturing is all about identifying waste-causing steps and eliminating them from the process. The lean manufacturing implementation process starts from imagining the production facility or company as one in the eyes of the customer. This thought throws up interesting questions for the company like:
One of the aspects that a company must consider while implementing lean manufacturing technique are the reasons for the existence of inventory. More often than not, scale of equipment and workflow are two important observations to this. Implementing Lean Manufacturing techniques start with study of the size of the product and the equipment. In all cases, a bigger product and equipment would mean that changeovers become mandatory. Additionally, the cause of different products taking different production routes also becomes a reason for implementing lean manufacturing techniques. Larger equipments also result in maintenance of inventory to a bigger extent which hence resulted in the need of breaking down equipment size and inventory. Setup Reduction and Cellular Manufacturing are two such techniques which aid lean manufacturing implementation by breaking down a large unit into smaller units. As an example, let us consider a Shirt manufacturing company which produces shirts for its customers. Implementation of Lean Manufacturing to the shirt production process would mean that designs for each component of the shirt is assembled. Units are created for the production of individual components of a shirt and the units commence production on their component. The units are given their product specifications in terms of the design and the required output and these units would be specialized in their lines of production. Since 5 units work in parallel mode for producing one unit of shirt, a shirt which could have taken 5 days to be produced, now takes only 1 day to be produced. Faster production time would eventually mean that large equipments and inventory would be a thing of the past and this way of production increases customer satisfaction levels dramatically. |