Labor costs. Inventory. Overproduction. Defects and production time loss. Businesses are expensive, and you may feel like you’ve done everything you can to stick to budget and slash expenses to the bone. The ugly truth is that business leadership is often looking for “costs to cut” in entirely the wrong way. If you’re consistently being asked to find ways to do this, sometimes at the expense of employee morale, culture, or real necessities, then lean manufacturing could be the solution you’ve been looking for.
Lean is based on the Toyota Production System, and it’s all about becoming efficient through the elimination of muda (waste), i.e. the inefficiencies in processes that you can reduce or eliminate entirely. The amount of wasted time, resources, space, talent, and production in businesses astounds me on a daily basis. With TPS, “I strongly believe that ‘necessity is the mother of invention. Even today, improvements at Toyota plants are made based on need. The key to progress in production improvement is letting the plant people feel the need.” (Ohno, Toyota Production System 13). It’s actually very simple: lean manufacturing is grounded in fundamentals, and two methods used in TPS to expose needs are takt time and standardized work.
TPS Terminology:
· Takt time: work accomplished within regular hours, ie the time which should be taken to produce a component
· Standardized work: the TPS organizes jobs around human motion and creates an efficient production sequence free of waste (muda) with 3 components: takt time, working sequence, and standard in-process stock.
This part of the process is typically done early in a company’s lean journey, but sometimes businesses get bogged down and the fundamentals get lost. When standardized work is initially implemented, the easily identified waste is not included in the amount of work used to determine how many team members are needed. There are no allowances for waste that we see in a traditional operation. This often results in the area of interest not meeting the production objectives. In response, the organization may resort back to traditional production standards that are more or less achievable, but obscure the opportunity for improvement.
However, the intent is that actual results are compared to the target (standard) and the organization begins problem solving to identify and eliminate the causes of lost production. By understanding what is preventing an area from achieving its targets and working to eliminate the problems one at a time, true productivity improvement begins to be achieved. It is also critical that the focus is on process at this point, not people.
If you're new to lean or are a seasoned professional, the fundamentals remain key to creating efficient processes. If you have questions, please comment below or click here to contact us! And feel free to head over to our results page to see real examples and actual results of how businesses like yours could save millions by implementing a lean strategy!
And remember:
“Present capacity = work + waste. True efficiency improvement comes when we produce zero waste and bring the percentage of work to 100 percent.” (Ohno, Toyota Production System 19).
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