Category: Lean Manufacturing

The following steps should be implemented to create the ideal lean manufacturing system: Design a Simple Manufacturing System A fundamental principle of lean manufacturing is demand‐based flow manufacturing. In this type of production setting, inventory is only pulled through each production center when it is needed to meet a customer’s order. The benefits of this…

Strategy Lean production has been adopted into other industries to promote productivity and efficiency in an ever‐changing market. In global supply chain and outsource scale, IT is necessary and can deal with most of hard lean practices to synchronize pull system in supply chains and value system. The manufacturing industry can renew and change strategy of…

The espoused goals of lean manufacturing systems differ between various authors. While some maintain an internal focus, e.g., to increase profit for the organization, others claim that improvements should be done for the sake of the customer (Liker and Hoseus 2008; Wormack et al. 1990). Some commonly mentioned goals are as follows: The strategic elements of lean…

Lean principles have been successfully applied to various sectors and services. For example, call center services use these principles to improve live agent call handling. By combining agent‐assisted automation and lean’s waste reduction practices, a company reduced handle time, reduced between agent variability, reduced accent barriers, and attained near perfect process adherence (Padmane et al. 2013).…

While lean is seen by many as a generalization of the TPS into other industries and contexts, there are some acknowledged differences that seem to have developed in implementation.

Lean Leadership The role of the leaders within the organization is the fundamental element of sustaining the progress of lean thinking. Experienced kaizen members at Toyota, for example, often bring up the concepts of Senpai, Kohai, and Sensei, because they strongly feel that transferring of Toyota culture down and across Toyota can only happen when more experienced Toyota…

Sigma (σ) denotes the standard deviation of a population. Six Sigma is the term used in industry to describe a process that has no more than 3.4 defects out of a million. The reference to Six Sigma suggests six standard deviations away from the center of a normal distribution, but the assumption of a perfectly…

Although the elimination of waste may seem like a simple and clear subject, it is noticeable that waste is often very conservatively identified. This then hugely reduces the potential of such an aim. The elimination of waste is the goal of lean, and Toyota defined three broad types of waste: muda, muri, and mura; for many lean implementations this…

Sakichi Toyoda Toyota’s development of ideas that later became lean may have started at the turn of the twentieth century with Sakichi Toyoda (Figure 8.12), in a textile factory with looms that stopped themselves when a thread broke. This became the seed of autonomation and Jidoka. Toyota’s journey with JIT may have started back in 1934 when it…

Benjamin Franklin Benjamin Franklin (Figure 8.8) contributed greatly to waste reduction thinking. Most of the basic goals of lean manufacturing and waste reduction were derived from Benjamin Franklin through documented examples. Poor Richard’s Almanac says of wasted time, “He that idly loses 5s. worth of time, loses 5s., and might as prudently throw 5s. into the river.”…