Why your Organisation needs a Lean Foundation!

Philosophy of Lean

Lean is a 'top-down, bottom-up' systematic method for the elimination of waste in ALL processes and is used to create a culture of continuous performance improvement.

Essentially Lean is centred on finding and eliminating waste in any process and is not just a manufacturing approach.

Lean 'tools' assist in the identification and steady elimination of waste and as these wastes are eliminated quality improves whillst production time and costs are reduced. Lean tools include; Single Minute Exchange of Die (SMED), 5S & Workplace Organisation, Visual Management, Problem Solving (G8D), Poka-Yoke (error proofing), Value Stream Mapping (VSM), Total Productive Maintenance (TPM and Control Charts

Benefits of Lean

Improve Quality: To stay competitive in todays fast moving marketplace, a company must understand it's customers needs and requirements and design the processes to meet these, for example Right First Time

Eliminate Waste: Waste is any activity that consumes time, resources or space but does not add any value to the product or service.

Reduce Time: By eliminating unnecessary motion, transportation and overprocessing, the overall process time taken will reduce.

Reduce Total Costs: Overproduction increases a company's inventory costs because of storage space requirements and cost of damage. Single Piece Flow is a usefu tool but can can increase costs in some process so its use needs to be carefully evaluated before implementation.

Lean Wastes

There are eight types of waste comonly assciated with Lean:

Transportation (moving products more than is necessary to perform a process)

Inventory (all components, work in progress and finished product not being processed)

Motion (people or equipment moving or walking more than is required to carry out a process)

Waiting (waiting for the next stage in a process, interruptions during shift changes)

Overproduction (production ahead of demand)

Over processing (resulting from poor tool or product design creating activity)

Scrap / Rework / Defects (time spent doing something ncorrectly, rework or checking for errors)

Underutlisation of people (their skills, knowledge and talent)

Have a look at our website for details of the Lean Foundation Workshops we offer, as well as individual Tools and Techniques