Lean Manufacturing

Lean Manufacturing Tool

Lean Manufacturing technique is used to cut down on production costs, time thereby increasing customer satisfaction and business profitability. Lean Manufacturing tools encompass concepts like Value Stream and information flow to ensure that the tools achieve both the objectives with consummate ease.

What are different Lean Manufacturing tools?

Continuous process improvement, just in time production, production smoothing are examples of tools which Lean Manufacturing tools employ to get a significant cost advantage to companies out of their production processes. Some of these tools which require some explanation are as follows:

• Cellular Manufacturing - Imagine you having to produce 100 Pallet Trucks which is one big piece of automobile ingenuity in 10 days. The task becomes next to impossible if you consider that each truck takes at least 1 day for a complete manufacture. To get the solution, all you need to do is to break the truck production into different units. Develop departments who will produce the individual units and one assembling area which will assemble all the units in to one truck. This technique of breaking down large production units into smaller ones thus saving time and costs is known as Cellular Manufacturing.
  
  
• Continuous Process Improvement - Kaizen is the Japanese terminology for continuous process improvement which is based on the modular strategy of 5 S( Sort, Straighten, Sweep and Clean, Systemize and Standardize). The concept behind 5 S fuels the waste reduction which is core to a Lean Manufacturing process. That it does by looking for waste and systematically eliminating it from the process.
  
  
• Just in Time Production - This tool uses the Pull Processing method to good effect. Rather than producing a good for the customer's use, it pulls the product from the customer end which feeds the next stage of production. This enables to detect waste materials in smaller units and discarding them. The whole process is coordinated by Kanban which is an information system.

Other techniques like Just in Time Distribution, Standardization of Work, Just in time purchasing achieve the same objective as others in terms of Lean Manufacturing. Essentially, all these tools follow different approaches to achieve the same end objective which is to ensure that the waste is reduced, cost is optimized and customer satisfaction levels are increased at all times. The waste discarded off the process could be raw material waste, waste process steps which cause lag times in the process.

When a company decides to employ these Lean Manufacturing tools on their processes, they do not need to use all these tools. Based on the analysis of their objectives, the company would choose one or more of these tools.