Application of Lean Manufacturing - A step towards Lean Management

Application of lean manufacturing is a huge challenge. As a manager, the application of lean manufacturing, may be a culture shock on the shop floor, however as time goes by people will adapt and understand the benefits. For any organization it's important to keep up to date with new managing techniques and any improvements that this may bring you.

When I first encountered lean thinking it was somehow in part similar to may to daily effort to improve. Although an application of lean manufacturing will use simple tools and methods to actually get things going rather quickly. Everyone will fee part of the transition, giving people information and directives to read, learn, practice and improve.

In my personal business, I found some direct applications of lean manufacturing principles with immediate benefit. My company can be divided into 3 independent value streams, being two of them more or less high output production lines, not so dependent on workforce to actually show results, places where I didn't see an easy return for lean manufacturing. However we do have a small cut to size plant (marble working) and I saw immediate benefits without great cost, we incremented output and reduced production costs.

Basically what I saw, was an opportunity to improve. After reading a lot about lean thinking on the Internet, I went out and bought a few books, which I read and learned so much. Lean thinking has enlightened me professionally and has  changed the way I look at shop floors and production flows... I was ready to look at my production with other eyes... It's really a question of perspective.

I saw my production as a value stream, and looked at the different machinery I had and at the products we are producing and boom ... all of a sudden I was thinking in a dimension which I really never looked at things that way...

It's true, most of the time I use in production, is waste, creating value is a little percentage of the time spent ... that's something I really was not aware of.... If you imagine it this way it'll be easy to understand: A lead time for an order will be 2 to 3 weeks, the actual producing time will be a few hours or days, but the time we use to create value will be less than an hour.

My simple advice to who has to manage a shop floor, with machinery and human resources, is look at what you do today in a different perspective and surely you'll find ways to improve.

After viewing my production, I established goals, reduced production lead time, increased productivity. We focused on clients needs and reorganized our production according to these new goals.

So basically I started by doing a breakdown of my production process, by product, this gave me an idea of how my machines and other resources are being used, and gave me an idea as to how well my floor plan was done. I had figured out a product flow that would improve output, the only thing now was getting upper level management involved, as some machines would have to be moved from current layout to new one, this involves big decisions, when you change anything in production, you have a whole bunch of overhead costs, electrical, air, water (in my case) and sewage (water treatment plant). But I proved that we did have problems with the current layout and got the green light to go ahead.

So basically I created a positive work flow on the shop floor, now phase 2. Next phase, was organization, the 5 S are essential, tools, human resources, raw materials, information all has to be well organized to have success, and at my company that was a big thing. So all of a sudden we're looking at everything and everyone, justifying the reason for each thing to exist and where it should be located. One very difficult thing to do, is maintain the 5 S, it's easy to begin with but it's hard to maintain, it's very tough but with the involvement of everyone it's easy to achieve success.

Lean is something that is constant, we always have the opportunity to improve, without a doubt that the tools are excellent, even though some times the results are difficult to measure, and surely the return is different in every case. Good luck.