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Have You Started Your Group On The Lean Manufacturing Process?

By Jimmy Woodall

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 31Oct2009 Word count: 469 Viewed: 169 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Lean manufacturers are producing the following results in certain industries, a reduction in the number of steps in the production process from 31 to 9 day as well as a fulfillment
time of 16 months down to 16 weeks.

Lean manufacturing is not all that complicated to implement, but to sustain any gains, you have to change the whole structure of the business and how management behaves. At the behavioral level, you have to change from the bottom up how the workers operate with lower inventory.

At the same time you have to change from the top down so that all the management systems will be implemented to support the people on the shop floor. Another mistake is managers frequently overlook that lean techniques need to be applied to all processes that helps support production, not just production itself.

For instance, once lean is implemented, the production people perform at a higher level with shorter cycle times and less inventory. But when a machine suddenly fails and requires the maintenance organization to jump into the action, they are not used to operating at that speed.

If you want the production people to operate more quickly, you have to make sure maintenance operates the same way. If you want a just in time production system, all of the support systems need to be just in time as well. How can manufacturers ensure long-term results from lean systems?

Lean manufacturing is finite, inherently limited to the reduction of a fixed quantity of cost. In recent years, therefore, leading product development organizations have sought to apply concepts of lean manufacturing more broadly, to product development activities.

Therefore, the past decade has seen the emergence of lean product development, a concept widely touted, written about and promoted within the manufacturing sector. The oft-cited Toyota production system is put forth as the quintessential example of lean done right.

But, while simply stated, the achievement of lean product development is not a trivial task. Fundamentally, lean asserts that there are ways to deploy people process and technology to better realize product development efficiencies.

Lean principles of front-end loading, smooth information flow and knowledge capture, foster a fluid, empowered development environment in which the activities of teams are highly visible, decision-making is delayed to the most opportune time, management is acutely involved in daily activities, and a culture of continual improvement prevails.

In particular, lean product development takes on increased relevance given today's highly distributed product development teams. On one hand, the promise of global product development offers company's greater worldwide capacity and resource flexibility.

Yet, it simultaneously risks offsetting productivity advantages of a centralized workgroup. If you are faced with meeting aggressive product development objectives through reliance on globally distributed team members and partners, the applicably of lean product development techniques may be of prime interest to your company.

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