All types of manufacturers are discovering the advantages of doing a Lean analysis and applying the principles of Lean Manufacturing to their own company. Perhaps you're faced with one, or many, of these challenges:

Increase:

THE RELATIONSHIP OF WASTE TO PROFIT

Customer Focus
Waste Factor: Zero customer dissatisfaction/Relationship to Profit: Customer input and feedback assures quality. Customer satisfaction supports sales.

Leadership
Waste factor: Zero misalignment/Relationship to Profit: Direction and support for development improves cost, quality, and speed.

Lean Organization
Waste Factor: Zero bureaucracy/Relationship to Profit: Team-based operations reduce overhead by eliminating bureaucracy and ensuring information flow and cooperation.

Partnering
Waste Factor: Zero stakeholder dissatisfaction/Relationship to Profit: Flexible relationships with suppliers, distributors, and society improve quality, cost, and speed.

Information Architecture
Waste Factor: Zero lost information/Relationship to Profit: Knowledge required for operations is accurate and timely, thus improving quality, cost, and speed.

Culture of Improvement
Waste Factor: Zero wasted creativity/Relationship to Profit: Employee participation in eliminating operations waste improves cost, quality, and speed.

Lean Production
Waste Factor: Zero non-value-added work/Relationship to Profit: Total employee involvement and aggressive waste elimination promote speedier operations and eradicate inventories.

Lean Equipment Management
Waste Factor: Zero failures, zero defects/Relationship to Profit: Longer equipment life and design improvements reduce cost. Meticulous maintenance and equipment improvements increase quality. Absolute availability and efficiency increase speed.

Lean Engineering
Waste Factor: Zero lost opportunity/Relationship to Profit: Early resolutions of design problems with customers and suppliers significantly reduces cost, while improving quality and cycle time.

THE TRUE COSTS OF INVENTORY

Reducing inventory is an important goal of the lean organization. Carrying inventory has many costs associated with it. Obvious costs include: capital tied up in inventory and the associated loss of interest on that capita., loss due to material handling damage, increased labor costs for material handling, and increased space and storage requirement. A cost from excess inventory that is not so obvious is quality. In fact, many companies have seen quality improvements resulting from inventory reductions while not focusing on quality. The reasoning is that if an upstream process is producing parts on a machine and defects occur halfway through the batch, in an organization with low levels of inventory the next downstream process will discover the defects sooner. An organization with low inventory levels can stop the process when the defect is discovered, throw out the defective inventory, and request the previous process to start another batch. The organization with lower inventory levels will also be more effective at determining what caused the defect because the batch that the defect occurred in is fresh in the minds of both production and maintenance.

OTHER BENEFITS