One of the main goals of any manufacturing business should be to reduce or eliminate the amount of waste on their production lines. The less waste that is being generated, the more efficiently a manufacturer is operating. Lean manufacturing is a modern approach to an age-old problem and one that delivers some fantastic results.
What Is Lean Manufacturing?
Lean manufacturing is a multifaceted approach to manufacturing that aims to reduce or eliminate the amount of waste in the process. The term waste can mean a lot of things, but in the context of manufacturing, none of them are positive. As a result, lean manufacturing aims to eliminate all types of waste. This includes the physical waste of materials as well as the wasted time caused by inefficiencies in the process.
Basically, anything that does not add value to your final product can be considered wasteful during the manufacturing process. By introducing a lean manufacturing philosophy to your production lines, you can devise a series of sustainable best practices that will ensure you are operating efficiently from now until the end of time.
Many savvy manufacturers will already be practicing a lot of the lessons that lean manufacturing has to offer. After all, the idea that manufacturers should be striving to reduce the waste that they generate is not a new or groundbreaking one. However, advances in technology mean that we now have much more sophisticated tools available to us for monitoring the efficiency and identifying opportunities to reduce waste. this means that manufacturers today are able to think about and approached the problem in a way that simply was not possible before.
Six Sigmas
At the core of the lean manufacturing philosophy are the six sigma. Six sigma refers to the process that lean manufacturing businesses use in order to reduce the number of errors on their production line and thereby significantly improve their overall efficiency. There are five steps to the six sigma process. When the six sigma is combined with the speed and waste elimination philosophy of lean manufacturing, the results can be outstanding.
Identifying Value
A key tenet for any manufacturer who wants to keep their waste to a minimum is that they should always be acting with purpose and never do things just for the sake of it. In order to accomplish this, manufacturers need to have a firm grasp of exactly where the value that they offer to customers is coming from. Without a concrete understanding and clear definition of your own value, it is going to be difficult to instill in your team the importance of ensuring that they are always adding value and never removing it.
Any amount of time or resources that are spent on something that does not improve the value of your end product can be considered wasteful. Whenever a new addition or alteration is proposed, the first thing that you should do is break it down to identify where the added value is coming from.
Mapping Your Value Stream
Once you understand the nature of the value that you are offering to customers, you can then begin working on a strategy for delivering more of it. Value stream mapping, sometimes known as material and information flow mapping, involves looking at the current state of a product and then comparing it with its expected future state and an ideal future state that you would like to obtain. A value stream map will plot the path that a product will take from manufacturing until it is sold to consumers, and at every point, it will quantify the costs in terms of time and resources.
Ultimately, this produces an easy-to-use visual guide to the manufacturing process that any business can use in order to quickly identify where there is room for efficiency gains.
Creating a Flow
In order to devise a truly efficient manufacturing process from start to finish, you will need to ensure that your production line flow is uninterrupted. Once you have laid out the journey that your product is expected to take during the manufacturing and distribution processes, it should be much easier to identify any potential bottlenecks. Your value map should include details about your resource and material costs at every point, enabling you to identify the areas where you might have difficulty in ensuring uninterrupted flows.
Refining Your Results
Once you have instituted your new manufacturing processes, you then need to monitor it and assess its long-term viability. Oftentimes, businesses find that even the most meticulous of plans can be thrown up in the air once they come into contact with the real world. Things don’t always go the way that we expect them to, and in the case of lean manufacturing, there are sometimes hidden resource costs and inefficiencies that we don’t notice until we actually put a theory into practice.
Lean Manufacturing – Here to Stay?
The benefits of lean manufacturing speak for themselves, and businesses who have adopted the lean approach are able to enjoy greater efficiency, less waste, and a more reliable production cycle for their products. Not only does lean manufacturing encourage manufacturers to operate more efficiently, but it also provides them with a useful and adaptable framework that they can use to refine their approach in other areas.
Lean manufacturing is clearly here to stay. In many ways, this approach represents the culmination of many decades of advances within the manufacturing technology sector. Without the robust software tools available to us today, it would be much more difficult to properly monitor efficiency on production lines and consequently more difficult to refine those processes. Anyone with an interest in one day working in manufacturing should consider studying for an online lean manufacturing degree from a leading university to prepare themselves for the future of the industry.
For businesses that prioritize efficiency above all else, lean manufacturing is an essential approach. There is no other approach to manufacturing that delivers such consistent results for businesses, irrespective of the industry they are manufacturing for.