Lean Manufacturing Principles: Steps to the Ideal Lean Manufacturing System
Many businesses struggle with lean manufacturing implementation. However, incorporating lean into your company isn’t as difficult as it seems. In fact, it only takes a few steps and an understanding of its principles.
Read on to learn more about the principles of lean and the steps needed to implement an ideal lean manufacturing system.
Purpose of Lean Manufacturing
Lean manufacturing is designed to help companies eliminate waste within their production process to promote productivity and ensure high-quality products. These wastes are categorized into three groups. Muri refers to the waste and bottlenecks created when workers and systems are overexerted. Mura refers to the waste created when there’s unevenness in the production system.
Finally, Muda refers to the seven types of waste listed below.
- Defects
- Overproduction
- Transport
- Overprocessing
- Inventory
- Motion
These activities don’t add value and result in wasted time, resources, and revenue.
Implement Lean with Lean Manufacturing Principles
All of the waste created in the production process can be reduced or eliminated by understanding the lean manufacturing principles.
These principles are the steps you need to take to implement lean into your company. When you understand these principles, your business can be more efficient and productive.
These are five lean manufacturing principles:
Lean Manufacturing Principle: Value
The overall goal of lean manufacturing is to help businesses create products that consumers want and need while reducing operation costs.
With that said, it’s important to first understand the value of your product as defined by your customers. To do this, identify what the customer is willing to pay for your product and base its price on that. You also want to make sure that your products meet their specific requirements or expectations.
Lean Manufacturing Principle: Value Stream
After the customer value of your product has been determined, map out the value stream, or all of the steps needed to make and deliver a product. Doing this will allow you to easily spot and remove unnecessary steps to reduce production waste and costs and to improve efficiency. It will also help you to find opportunities to improve the overall production processes to better create high-quality products in a timely and cost-effective manner.
Lean Manufacturing Principle: Flow
Once the waste has been removed from the value stream, you need to make sure that the manufacturing processes flows smoothly. This includes ensuring that there are no interruptions or delays in the production process.
Lean Manufacturing Principle: Pull
When everything is flowing smoothly, you can get your products to your customers and to the market quickly and easily. With that said, consumers will be able to pull or request products from you as needed without having to worry about long wait times. This principle also helps you to create only the necessary amount of product to avoid excessive inventory or storage costs.
Lean Manufacturing Principle: Perfection
The last principle of lean manufacturing is perfection. Considered to be the most important principle, perfection helps businesses to understand that lean isn’t static. With time, trends can lead to changes in the process and your company. To ensure that your business takes advantage of all of the benefits that lean manufacturing offers, you must be willing to make improvements to the process when needed. This will help to ensure consistent waste reduction and promote productivity and efficiency for years to come.
For more information to improve the efficiency of your manufacturing business, check out manufacturing articles.