Lean Manufacturing

Lean Manufacturing Technique

A lean manufacturing technique is one in which process are tuned to be performance-based in order to ensure that a competitive cost advantage is presented to a company in the functions of product development or production of goods. Lean Manufacturing prides itself on the aspect of Continuous Improvement of the processes by cutting down costs which is accomplished by reducing wastes at each and every step of production.

What are the values behind a Lean Manufacturing technique?

Though Lean signifies achievement of results with speed and quality, it does not mean that a Lean Manufacturing technique does not have its own set of values.

• All actions in the production process from designing of the concept to the customer usage are tracked and identified. The mapping of these actions result in the formation of a Value Stream.
  
  
• Every Value Stream has its basis on Values. These are a set of factors for which the customer pays for.
  
  
• Flow - A process can reduce cost and speed up the delivery time in cases where value streams do not face any roadblocks. Lean Manufacturing identifies the need for identifying all the processes which infringe on the flow of information and activities in a production process and eliminating them.
  
  
• Pull - The pull of a process is defined by how able the process is in translating and transitioning the product from the design concept to the customer usage stage.
  
  
• Perfection - Lean Manufacturing believes that customer satisfaction can be achieved the first time if the process achieves perfection the first time. It also believes that customer satisfaction can be achieved at all times if the process is perfect at all times. That is the reason for stopping the production in cases where variations to the product is found during the production process.

Any Lean Manufacturing technique can be adopted and may also turn out successful if the company has a firm leadership at the top which is committed to reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction levels. Apart from this, a team based culture and good communication systems just ensures that the Lean Manufacturing techniques integrate well with the production process.

Let's remember that Lean Manufacturing is all about Continuous Process Improvement and Simultaneous development. This means, "What you learn, you unlearn immediately". This objective of a Lean Manufacturing technique ensures that even when process variations are identified, not much of time is wasted to fix those process variations. At the end of the day, time is of critical importance for implementation of any Lean technique. Time saved in each stage of the process will translate to potentially huge cost savings for the company.