In the modern world, we are witness to the changes that are happening in the economic formation.
In the outgoing era, most of the manufacturing units are focused on mass production.
But now it is time to shift to the modern era, focus on lean manufacturing.
Now the time has been starting for lean thinking:
What is Lean Thinking?
Let us take a look:
The Lean thinking is a management approach, that focuses on maximizing the satisfaction of the customer while reducing waste. This philosophy may help to increase efficiency, decrease expenses, and enhance the overall quality of products or services.
Its key principles include improvement that is ongoing, elimination of waste, and keeping the customer as priority in mind. Lean thinking involves a deliberate method of recognizing and getting rid of activities that do not add value, simplifying processes and raise efficiency.
So, lean thinking is a perfect philosophy of lean production, which allows you to take a fresh look at the existing order of things in the production cycle. The formation supports combating losses at all levels of the company.
The key word here is not loss, but philosophy, that is, a kind of ideology that must penetrate the minds of the organization’s personnel, and all personnel – “From top to bottom”, otherwise it will turn out “as always”.
Lean in Action: Practical
It is universal true; the waste is direct impact on the production efficiency and quality. Hence, each manufacturing unit should take effective actions for eliminating the waste from the all levels of the production lines.
But one thing comes to mind, which thing we can consider as waste?
The straight answer is:
“By customer’s point of view: Anything which is not add value to product, that is waste for customer.”
What is the basic idea behind this quote? what mean? everything mean, everything?
No!
Key concept is: If some action, operation, feature, or product etc., does not add value to the product for customer, these will be considered as a waste. Why I use word “some” because, the wastes are divide into two categories:
The first type of waste simply cannot be eliminated from the processes. Such as, calculation for payroll of the employees is actually not add-value in the product for customer point of view, but without it is impossible to maintain the efficiency of the manufacturing unit. Hence, we cannot remove it, but we can optimize as much as possible.
The second type of waste we can be easy to avoid if we perform sufficient actions to eliminate from the processes. The details of these type of wastes, as well how to eliminate it from manufacturing processes, the details are as below:
Overproduction
When the management prioritize to utilize equipment, and resources to their maximum capacity. Which may sometimes lead to feeling of being overburden and stresses for those who involves.
This is consequence for the way of thinking of management can be as below:
- Premature consumption of raw materials and materials.
- Sub-optimal use of labor.
- The need to purchase additional equipment.
- Increase in usable areas.
- An increase in the percentage of deductions (for example, property tax).
- Excessive increases in inventories.
- Increased transport and administrative costs.
To solve overproduction, we have to take some strict actions to eliminate the possibility of this event. Such as implementation of JIT, increase the practice of Pull System, Try to reduce lead time, regular monitoring on the inventory levels, and encourage employees to involve in this movement.
However, continuously improving the processes are also much more important in which require regular review and improve processes.
Excess stocks
Most businesses naturally stockpile goods to protect against rising prices. Which is actually not needed in production at present. This can result in increased storage costs, tied up working capital, and obsolescence.
Lean manufacturing aims to reduce excess stock by promoting just-in-time (JIT) inventory systems. Emphasizes ordering materials only when needed for production. Which ultimately helps to reduce waste, improve efficiency and increase overall profitability.
Build quality in
Obvious losses that draw on material and human resources. The philosophy of Lean says that it is necessary to build such a system in which any deviation from the norm will immediately catch the eye.
Back in the 30s of the last century, the world-famous consultant William Edwards Deming, who was working at AT&T at that time on the concept of “built-in” quality, wrote: “The occurrence of defects during the process is 95% dependent on the quality of the process itself and only 5% on the human factor.”
Toyota has developed this idea. The concept of Poka-yoke (“protection from a fool”) was developed, according to which the process is built in such a way that the employee, performing any operation, cannot perform it incorrectly.
Special multifunctional groups of specialists are constantly working on this, which include not only engineers, but also workers.
Another great achievement of Toyota is the control that products with a defect do not move to the next site. Elimination of the defect is carried out at the place of its detection by its own forces and with the help of special response teams.
Here it is – comprehensive quality management, the concept of TQM (Total Quality Management) in action. Responsibility for quality is assigned to employees at all levels – from top to bottom, and this already requires a complete change in the consciousness of the staff, the adoption of a philosophy of quality.
Unnecessary operations and movements in the workplace
Lean manufacturing focuses on streamlining processes to create a more efficient & productive workplace. If any process, operation, or activity does not add value to the final product or is unnecessary from the customer’s point of view, it should be shut down. Because these types of operations or movement can increase the burden to employees.
As a result of the elimination of non-required processes, the number of steps will be reduced to final the product. The distance of materials, equipment or even manpower traveling will be also reduced. This will reduce expenses significantly. And employees may be able to perform their tasks more effectively. Hence, it may increase efficiency and reduce the risk of injury.
Remember that, theoretically it looks good, but there can be so many challenges to identify & eliminate such a task. The processes for identifying these types of processes may require sufficient observations, examination, and approaches. However, each workman associate with the production processes should be involve in this operation.
Excessive processing
Trying to establish tighter tolerances than required by the customer’s specification. Machinery such as increases the possibility of defects, often requires the use of a different, more expensive tool (including for operation control) and the highest possible skill of the performers.
In addition, the analysis of production flows reveals operations that can be dispensed with while maintaining the quality of the product at the same level.
Downtime
The downtime is born when any machine / equipment waits for materials, tools, device or even manpower from the previous process. Usually, it may happen when the production lines are imbalanced in productivity.
To reduce downtime may require some efforts: such as maintain the balance in the operations, preventive maintenance, proper planning, and sufficient training to each employee.
Unnecessary movements
Transportation and relocation are an essential part of the production process, however, from the customer’s point of view, all internal movements and transportation do not add value to the product.
The customer does not care at what distances and in what ways the product is moved. In some enterprises, the length of the flow “from gate to gate” can be several kilometers, sometimes more than ten. And if we approach the changes from the point of view of the Lean philosophy, the reduction in the flow length can lead to very impressive results in reducing the total production time, the time of passage of products “from gate to gate”, reducing losses from damage due to transportation, reducing inventories and production areas. All this significantly affects the overall financial results of the company.
Loss of creativity by employees
A very serious type of loss affecting the overall position of the company. If a person does not care what he does, then it is not necessary to expect responsibility for the result from him, not to mention responsibility for the quality of the work he performs.
To the questions why Toyota is very open, why it arranges excursions to its production for everyone and reveals almost all its secrets, the company’s managers answer:
In order to do as is done in our company, you must educate people who will work the same way – with full dedication, showing a creative approach to solving the tasks that the company’s management sets.
People are the main asset of the company. And the preparation of such people takes time!
Steps
For the production of a new type, the following principles are characterized primarily by the following principles:
- Teamwork.
- Intensive open exchange of information.
- Efficient use of resources and elimination of losses.
- Continuous improvement.
Naturally, in the era of lean manufacturing, following the principles of mass production is completely unprofitable.
It has been proven that mass production is on average twice as bad as lean in such conventional indicators as required investments, production and output costs, time required to bring new products to market, etc.
To move to a new type of production, at least two things have to change that are actually very difficult to change: management and mentality.
The Lean Manufacturing talks about step-by-step transformation. Here are the steps:
- Find a change agent.
- Find an authoritative teacher whose ideas you can use.
- Take advantage of a crisis situation or create it to stimulate the transformation of the organization.
- Map the entire value stream for each product group.
- Choose any important field of activity and quickly begin to eliminate losses in order to discover to your own surprise how much can be done in a short period.
Many companies faithfully follow the first three steps and then go straight to the fifth, but the fourth step is essentially the most critical.
Value Stream Map
The creation of a value stream map is one of the most important tools for building an organization, in accordance with the principles of lean philosophy.
To create the VSM, herein the process is divided into two stages:
- To build a map of the current state:
- Analysis of existing processes in the value stream.
- Identification of sources of loss.
- Building a map of the future state (what we want to get):
- Creation of a plan to eliminate the sources of loss.
- Appoint a project manager to implement changes to a specific thread.
- Identification of key performance indicators for the implementation of the project.
- Determination of the timing of the project implementation.
A value stream map is like a photograph of what is happening in the enterprise in reality.
Sometime, when building a map of the current state, very gross violations of the technology are revealed, and the execution time of certain operations is significantly different from that described in the documents (for example, in the technological process).
Flow Mapping
When building a flow map, our task is to see the entire flow as a whole, Same as we seeing a bird’s eye view.
When you create a map, the following data is recorded:
- The name of the equipment or process.
- The execution time of the operation or process (the actual time is recorded, and not indicated in the currently existing documentation).
- Reliability of the equipment (operating time of the equipment without breakdowns).
- The number of operators or employees performing a particular operation or maintaining a process.
- Availability of stocks in the warehouse of raw materials and materials for this flow (in days), the number of finished products (in days), the number of inter-operational and inter-workshop stocks of unfinished products for this flow (in days).
- The procedure and timing of placing orders with suppliers on this stream.
- The procedure for shipment and the timing of the formation of orders from customers for this type of product or group of products;
- Stroke time – the period for which a unit of production must be manufactured is calculated based on the customer’s needs per day or shift (example: full time of the working day or shift, divided by the amount of finished product that must be shipped to the client for the same period); The clock time specifies the cycle time, that is, the execution of one operation must be less than or equal to the clock time;
- The procedure for planning production at the enterprise, as well as the level of detail of these plans and the procedure for passing these documents.
Analysis
The main task of this work is to assess the efficiency of the flow. The flow efficiency is counted as the total time of operations that add value to the product from the customer’s point of view. It will be divided by the total time the product passes through the entire flow and multiplied by 100%.
In practice, this figure is less than 2% for general enterprises. So, there’s a lot to work on.
The current state map is perhaps the most effective tool for analyzing the work of any enterprises, including companies engaged in the service sector, banking, healthcare, not to mention production organizations.
Moreover, it clearly allows you to see the main sources of losses and develop a plan for their elimination or significant reduction.
Following the principles of the ideology of lean production allows you to simultaneously solve the important task of choosing the right level of automation of production. It turns out that it is not always necessary to strive for full automation.
The organization of work on the Just-in-Time system requires that there is not too much automation and not too little. But exactly as much as is necessary to minimize the cost of equipment maintenance.
It’s Not Fiction
In some cases, the results of the transition to lean production can seem fantastic. According to lean Enterprise Institute in world practice, the result of the introduction of this ideology is:
- Reduction of defects by 90%;
- Reduction of production cycle time by 90%;
- Faster time-to-market by 50% to 75%
- 73% reduction in costs.
Unfortunately, within the framework of a short article. It is impossible to display all the tools and approaches that are used when building a Lean organization.
Entire training courses are devoted to these problems. Recently, there are more and more books on this subject. The purpose of this article is to try to arouse interest primarily among managers and leading specialists of enterprises.
Today, dozens of enterprises are already trying to follow the Lean path and many of them have achieved impressive results. Some of them, using only their capabilities and the profits received as a result of the introduction of Lean, were able to do without significant investments in carrying out production transformations.