The Industry Week Census of Manufacturers tells us that a variety of techniques that come under the heading of "lean manufacturingä are becoming best practices success factors for the new Millennium. What factors might those be?
At the plant floor level, Industry Week identifies several specifics.
Quick changeover techniques are used to reduce equipment setup time, and permit more frequent setups that go with small lot manufacturing.
At the same time, continuous flow production techniques are used to bring down lot sizes and also reduce setup time. The idea is to cut work-in-process inventory and improve throughput Overall, this reduces cycle time and inventory.
Of course none of this works if you still have inventory piled up at the front end of the production line, so just-in-time-supplier delivery also gets reorganized so that there can be more small lots and more quick changeovers.
Finally, equipment and supplies get rearranged, something called Cellular Manufacturing so that they facilitate both small lot and continuous flow production.
WALLY's COMMENT . . .If you're not in manufacturing, this can seem like so much gibberish. Look a little closer, though, and we find some basic principles that are applicable to just about every business there is.
The first principle is to eliminate as much waste as you can. Especially in good economic times, we tend to build up our waste buffers. We build up waste buffers of time and waste buffers of money and waste buffers of inventory and waste buffers of human resources. We begin to tolerate the equivalent of high scrap rates. Make it your business to eliminate as much waste from your operations and your functions as you possibly can.
Reorganize your workflow. In manufacturing, that means moving things around so things flow better. But in any kind of a business, if you look at the critical processes that your business has and then reorganize them to be more effective, youâll gain dollars and efficiency. When I work with clients, one of the things I like to do is to track the information paths or the paper paths or the product paths through an organization or through a supply chain. We look at the numbers of individual transactions or information or product sharing, and build up a picture of where the most intense flows are and where the bottlenecks reside. Then we go about automating those intense flows and eliminating those bottlenecks.
That's your next point -- eliminate the bottlenecks. Sometimes this is as simple as moving to a management-by- exception process where only exceptions to clearly define norms get review for approval. Often this involves taking steps and decision points that aren't necessary out of the process. In the manufacturing world, that's moving toward what's called continuous flow. You can do the same thing in your business. Eliminate the bottlenecks.
Finally, consider moving to what manufacturers call a pull system. In a pull system for a manufacturer, it's an order down the supply chain that triggers the sequence that results in an order up the supply chain followed by production, followed by shipment. What's the equivalent in your business? How much of what you do needs to be standing around waiting for an order, and how much can happen after an order is placed?
Created/Revised/Reviewed: 8/15/00
Reviewed: 2/15/03
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