LEAN

"The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize."
- Shigeo Shingo

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."
- Peter Drucker

Description:

LEAN is a strategy for remaining competitive through the endless pursuit of waste elimination and enables more to be produced with less equipment, less human resources, less time and space; which ensures customers receive what they want when they require it.

A LEAN organisation understands customer value and focuses its key process to:

• Continuously increase its value
• Eliminating waste along entire value steams instead of at isolated points
• Creates process that requires less human effort
• Less space
• Less capital
• Less time to make products and
• Deliver services with less cost and few defects compared with traditional business systems.

PRINCIPLES OF LEAN

The five-step thought process for guiding the implementation of lean techniques is easy to remember, but not always easy to achieve:

1. Specify value from the standpoint of the end customer by product family.
2. Identify all the steps in the value stream for each product family, eliminating whenever possible those steps that do not create value.
3. Make the value-creating steps occur in sequence so the product will flow smoothly towards the customer.
4. As flow is introduced, let customers pull value from the next upstream activity.
5. As value is specified, value streams are identified, wasted steps are removed, and flow and pull are introduced; begin the process again and continue it until a state of perfection is reached in which perfect value is created with no waste.

The Benefits:

• Identifies areas of waste in the organisation and eliminates it.
• Mistake proofing process by reduction of defects.
• Value Stream Mapping across multiple processes to provide information on the flow of materials and information with a view of improving process.
• Reduction in change over and set up times.
• Employee benefits by clearly defining individual roles and responsibilities reducing overlapping and unclear expectations.
• Improvement in space utilisation and working environment.

How PQM Can Help?

Power Quality Management Limited (PQM) can assist organisations by using proven tools and techniques to quickly implement LEAN principles/methodologies into manufacturing and service organisations.

For further information, please .

Note: This web page is not intended to provide comprehensive coverage of the subject, merely a brief introduction to provoke thought and to lead to a more in depth understanding and application of the topic, either through further reading - or from me as your management consultant, executive trainer or personal coach in a consultancy project, training course, workshop or seminar.