Lean Manufacturing –
- A way to eliminate waste and improve efficiency in a manufacturing environment
- Lean focuses on flow, the value stream and eliminating muda, the Japanese word for waste
- Lean manufacturing is the production of goods using less of everything compared to traditional mass production: less waste, human effort, manufacturing space, investment in tools, inventory, and engineering time to develop a new product.
Lean and Just-in-Time
What is 'Waste'?
- Lean was generated from the Just-in-time (JIT) philosophy of continuous and forced problem solving
- Just-in-time is supplying customers with exactly what they want when they want it With JIT, supplies and components are “pulled” through a system to arrive where they are needed when they are needed.
What is 'Waste'?
- Waste is anything that happens to a product that does not add value from the customer’s perspective
- Products being stored, inspected or delayed, products waiting in queues, and defective products do not add value
Seven wastes:
- Overproduction – producing more than the customer orders or
producing early. Inventory of any kind is usually waste.
- Queues –
idle time, storage, and waiting are wastes
- Transportation – moving material between plants, between
work centers, and handling more than once is waste
- Inventory
– unnecessary raw material, work-in-process (WIP), finished goods, and excess
operating supplies
- Motion –
movement of equipment or people
- Overprocessing – work performed on product that adds no
value
- Defective product – returns, warranty claims, rework and scrap
5 Principles of LEAN:
- Value - specify what creates
value from the customer’s perspective.
- The value stream – identify all the steps along the process
chain.
- Flow - make the value process
flow.
- Pull - make only what is
needed by the customer (short term response to the customer’s rate of demand)
- Perfection - strive for perfection by continually
attempting to produce exactly what the customer wants
