Streamline workflows for a harmonious production environment and minimize waste. Lean Management prioritizes the completion of value-adding steps over non-value-adding ones.
A company that produces more than it needs creates excess products that require extra transportation, excessive motion, and waiting time to be sold.
This overproduction also results in a loss of customers that you invested costly marketing resources to acquire.
1. Identifying the Value Stream
Lean Management is a philosophy that prioritizes value for customers and continuous improvement for team members. It encourages employees to identify areas for improvement and speak up when they see a way to make the process better.
Identifying value requires looking at all the steps it takes to deliver a product to the customer. This process is known as value stream mapping. This is a crucial step in identifying wasteful processes.
The next step is eliminating or improving these unnecessary steps. Many Lean teams use daily huddle meetings or calls to organize their improvement work. Gemba walks are also common practice, where supervisors and managers visit the work site to observe first-hand any workflow issues. Often, these observations lead to new ideas for improvement that are then vetted through the PDSA cycle.
2. Identifying and Eliminating Waste
While lean production is geared towards eliminating waste in factories, the same principles apply to any kind of business. Streamlining processes and eliminating unnecessary complications can improve productivity and team morale. Identifying and eliminating waste is a continual process that should be built into your processes, rather than an event conducted by process re-engineering consultants every few years.
Typical types of waste include overprocessing (putting more into a product than is necessary for its usefulness and importance), inventory, motion, and skills waste (underutilizing highly skilled employees or having teams work on different Transportation Optimization projects that require similar skills). You can eliminate most of these by using a Value Stream Mapping method to analyze the current state, designing your future state, and creating a pull system that only produces items when needed.
3. Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement
A successful lean manufacturing system depends on a workforce that actively looks for opportunities to improve the workflow. This approach encourages employees to take on leadership roles and to work together in kaizen teams.
One of the most important steps in this process is strategy deployment (also known as Hoshin Kanri). Leaders align the entire organization around the top breakthrough goals and strategic objectives for the company. This ensures that all improvement efforts align with the larger organizational plan.
Employees also identify and address issues through daily huddle meetings (physical or virtual) and a variety of other tools like the communal Kanban board that visually tracks a repetitive process. Gemba walks are another method of identifying problems firsthand and getting immediate feedback from the shop floor.
4. Creating a Single-Piece Flow
Modern lean management embraces the lessons of generations of experimentation in management. Among those lessons is the concept of one piece flow. This principle focuses on processing only what the customer wants and when he wants it. This reduces inventory, lead time and waste.
A key aspect of this process is the use of a pull system that encourages operators to work on demand. This minimizes storage and inventory, while increasing productivity. It also allows for a more efficient layout of the facility, reducing physical movement between stations and decreasing overall cycle times.
Creating this kind of system requires a team effort that involves everyone in the company, especially those closest to the workflow. Encouraging problem-solving at the gemba and implementing performance huddles can help build this culture.
5. Creating a Just-In-Time Flow
A key step in the lean management system is eliminating waste. In this case, waste is any process that does not add value to the customer. This includes anything that does not directly contribute to a product or service, such as production or inventory.
JIT allows a company to build and ship products just as they are needed. This reduces inventory costs and eliminates the need to schedule deliveries based on anticipated demand. For example, a smokeless fire pit company would produce these products as customers order them, rather than building large quantities and then shipping them all at once.
Implementing the six elements of lean management takes time and effort, especially for a company that doesn't have experience with this type of culture. For this reason, it is important for senior managers to support and promote the cultural philosophy of lean management.
