Lean Manufacturing Basics

Lean Manufacturing

Lean Manufacturing as a concept originated in the manufacture designing rooms of Toyota, the famous automobile manufacturer in Japan. What was conceived as a concept of reducing Toyota 7 wastes, resulted in Toyota's emergence as a small player in its domain to where it is today. Lean Manufacturing has its roots in accomplishing a task with speed with focus on customer quality. The fact that as a manufacturing technique it focuses heavily on speed of process execution allows it to have businesses reduce their production time hence establishing heavy cost benefits for the business.

Techniques of Lean Manufacturing

Lean Manufacturing as advocated by Toyota can be accomplished by either of the two techniques:

• Waste Reduction or Flow implementation of work through the system. Waste reduction is a technique where 'wastes' at every stage of the process is identified and discarded off the process step in itself.
  
  
• Techniques like the Continuous Process Improvement (Kaizen), Poka - Yoke (A Japanese technique for Mistake proofing) are used in waste reduction. In addition to all this, the propensity of the product developers to ask the 5 Why questions at each and every stage of production attested the necessity of stage components to be present during the stages thereby knocking off unwanted components.

Flow implementation of work through the system acquires a system based approach. Almost the opposite of the Waste Reduction method, it establishes the importance of a system and allows a systems perspective to the entire process of waste reduction. This could be accomplished by techniques like Production Leveling, Pull Production and the Heijunka box.

Are they different and if no, are they correlated?

Conceptually, they are different but they are correlated in a sense that the System based approach exposes the flaws and the 'wastes' in the processes through its systems and the waste reduction mechanism identifies these waste components and discards it off the process. There are many tools which could practically correlate both waste reduction and the system based approach in practical terms. Essentially, the core reason for the existence for both of these is to reduce cost of production.

The addition of the Lean aspect to the entire process ensures that the core objective of a company during the production of a good is achieved - Cost is reduced, Quality is met and production of goods is timely. For any company to think of deriving benefits like the three mentioned above would be a good deal that it would have bargained for, especially during the production process which is said to be a high cost addition to the company.