LEAN MANUFACTURING

OLANRELE OLADEJI. O
ND (ELECT/ELECT) THE POLYTECHNIC IBADAN (2005).
Bsc (INDUSTRIAL AND PRODUCTION ENGINEERING) UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN, IBADAN. (2010).
olanreleoladeji@yahoo.com.

AN ARTICLE WRITTEN TO BE PUBLISHED IN INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING STUDENT ASSOCIATION(IESA) MAGZINE.

LEAN MANUFACTURING.
One of the key requirements for any organization to show its customer that it cares is the establishment of a customer service department. After all, organization exists solely for the purpose of providing customer values, and in turn retains their customers or secure new one. No wonder companies nowadays are driven by various techniques for identifying the customers, products/services, quality characteristics, and performance measures which are most important to the company. An Industrial engineer must be conversant with some of the various techniques available in other to be relevant in the industry, as customer focus/orientation is taking the fore front in management planning; one of such techniques is “Lean or Lean Manufacturing”.

Historically, Lean manufacturing evolved from techniques developed by Taiichi Ohno and others at Toyota in the 1950s and 1960s, Lean manufacturing is a generic process management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System (TPS); hence the term Toyotism is also prevalent. It is renowned for its focus on reduction of the original Toyota seven wastes to improve overall customer value. After formulating the guiding principles of its Lean manufacturing approach in the Toyota Production System (TPS), Toyota formalized in 2001 the basis of its Lean management: the key managerial values and attitudes needed to sustain continuous improvement in the long run.

Lean Manufacturing History.

Lean manufacturing technique constitute a new approach to production management and result of the widespread use of the principles outside of Japan, initially through Japanese-owned plants using local labour, and then by the establishment of locally owned and staffed firms using the techniques in the United State, Britain, Europe and elsewhere.

Lean Manufacturing is a term used to describe a manufacturing, industrial or service operation which operates with little or no waste with the core idea of maximizing customer value. “Value” is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. Simply, Lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources. A Lean organization understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste.


Components of Lean Production System.

There is a popular misconception which beliefs that Lean is suited only for manufacturing which is not true. Lean applies in every business and every process. It is not a tactic or a cost reduction program, but a way of thinking and acting for an entire organization. Businesses in all industries and services, including healthcare and governments, are using Lean principles as the way they think and do. Many organizations choose not to use the word Lean, but to label what they do as their own system, such as the Toyota Production System or the Danaher Business System, to drive home the point that Lean is not a program or short term cost reduction program, but the way the company operates. The word transformation or Lean transformation is often used to characterize a company moving from an old way of thinking to Lean thinking. It requires a complete transformation on how a company conducts business this takes a long-term perspective and perseverance.

In today's world more and more organizations are realizing how important quality and customer satisfaction is in order to sustain a competitive business. There is also a pressure to reduce costs and increase efficiencies not only in manufacturing but in different types of industries, such as banking, business and community services. The challenge today is adapting these concepts and technologies to this wide range of industries successfully. The key to success in implementing Lean manufacturing principles in any organization is to foster a culture of continuous improvement, Lean thinking, and customer satisfaction as the organization's ultimate goal. This shift in culture, if not already present, must come from top management and be embraced by all layers of the organization.


Lean Enterprise.

There are four goals that a Lean manufacturing systems sets out to achieve, they are:
• Improve quality: To stay competitive in today’s marketplace, a company must understand its customers' wants and needs and design processes to meet their expectations and requirements.

• Eliminate waste: Waste is any activity that consumes time, resources, or space but does not add any value to the product or service. There are seven types of waste:
(1) Transport (unnecessary movement of materials)
(2) Inventory (excess inventory not directly required for current orders)
(3) Motion (extra steps taken by employees because of inefficient layout)
(4) Waiting (periods of inactivity)
(5) Overproduction (occurs when production should have stopped)
(6) Over Processing (rework and reprocessing)
(7) Defects (do not conform to specifications or expectations)
Taking the first letter of each waste, the acronym “TIM WOOD” is formed. This is a common way to remember the wastes.

• Reduce time: Reducing the time it takes to finish an activity from start to finish is one of the most effective ways to eliminate waste and lower costs.

• Reduce total costs: To minimize cost, a company must produce only to customer demand. Overproduction increases a company’s inventory costs because of storage needs.

The essence of Lean manufacturing is the total elimination of waste. The two main notions for waste elimination are as follows.
• Just-In-Time (JIT) production: Just-In-Time basically means to produce the necessary units in the necessary quantities at the necessary time.
• Autonomous Defect Control: This is the idea that the workforce is responsible for, and empowered to prevent, any defect part travelling to the next process. To support these two goals, a whole range of management and process engineering methods, some of which were already familiar in the West, must be brought to bear on the production problem simultaneously.

Managers and Executives embarking on Lean transformations must take into consideration three fundamental business issues that should guide the transformation of the entire organization:
- Purpose: What customer problems will the enterprise solve to achieve its own purpose of prospering?

- Process: How will the organization assess each major value stream to make sure each step is valuable, capable, available, adequate, flexible, and that all the steps are linked by flow, pull, and levelling?

- People: How can the organization insure that every important process has someone responsible for continually evaluating that value stream in terms of business purpose and Lean process? How can everyone touching the value stream be actively engaged in operating it correctly and continually improving it?

An example of a Lean implementation program could be
 A flow based approach (as used in the Toyota Production system with supplier):
• Sort out as many of the visible quality problems as you can, as well as downtime and other instability problems, and get the internal scrap acknowledged and its management started.
• Make the flow of parts through the system or process as continuous as possible using work cells and market locations where necessary and avoiding variations in the operators work cycle.
• Introduce standard work and stabilise the work pace through the system.
• Start pulling work through the system, look at the production scheduling and move toward daily orders with kanban cards (a representation of message that signals depletion of product, parts or inventory).
• Even out the production flow by reducing batch sizes, increase delivery frequency internally and if possible externally, level internal demand.
• Improve exposed quality issues using the tools.
• Remove some people (or increase quotas) and go through this work again.

 With a tools-based approach:
• Senior management to agree and discuss their lean vision.
• Management brainstorm to identify project leader and set objectives.
• Communicate plan and vision to the workforce.
• Ask for volunteers to form the Lean Implementation team (5-7 works best, all from different departments).
• Appoint members of the Lean Manufacturing Implementation Team.
• Train the Implementation Team in the various lean tools - make a point of trying to visit other non competing businesses that have implemented lean.
• Select a Pilot Project to implement – 5S is a good place to start.
• Run the pilot for 2–3 months - evaluate, review and learn from your mistakes.
• Roll out pilot to other factory areas.
• Evaluate results, encourage feedback.
• Stabilize the positive results by teaching supervisors how to train the new standards you've developed with TWI methodology (Training Within Industry).
• Once you are satisfied that you have a habitual program, consider introducing the next lean tool. Select the one that gives you the biggest return for your business.

Three steps to be implemented in other to create an ideal Lean manufacturing system are:
1. Design a simple manufacturing system
A fundamental principle of Lean manufacturing is demand based flow manufacturing. In this type of production setting, inventory is only pulled through each production centre when it is needed to meet a customer’s order. The benefits of this goal include:
• decreased cycle time
• less inventory
• increased productivity
• increased capital equipment utilization


2. Recognize that there is always room for improvement
The core of Lean is founded on the concept of continuous product and process improvement and the elimination of non value added activities. “The Value adding activities are simply only those things the customer is willing to pay for, everything else is waste, and should be eliminated, simplified, reduced, or integrated”. Improving the flow of material through new ideal system layouts at the customer's required rate would reduce waste in material movement and inventory.



3. Continuously improve the Lean manufacturing system design
A continuous improvement mindset is essential to reach a company's goals. The term “continuous improvement” means incremental improvement of products, processes, or services over time, with the goal of reducing waste to improve workplace functionality, customer service, or product performance. “For improvement to flourish it must be carefully cultivated in a rich soil bed (a receptive organisation), given constant attention (sustained leadership), assured the right amounts of light (training and support) and water (measurement and data) and protected from damaging.”



The combined effect of Lean Manufacturing and other manufacturing techniques like Six Sigma, has led to improvements in product quality (98% reduction in errors) and turnaround time (50% reduction). These improvements have resulted not only in cost reduction, but also the possibility of presenting these improvement stories to the customer, building the reputation of the company as a leading supplier of quality, and thereby increasing the probability of getting higher volumes of business..

Examples of real life application of Lean Technique are stated below:
• University Medical Imaging (UMI) in Brighton, New York, USA successfully implemented a Lean and Six Sigma transactional process improvement and training program when delays and other issues began to affect patient satisfaction.
• When Valley Baptist Medical Centre in Harlingen, Texas, USA, faced with the problem of discharging in-patients, it decided to apply Lean, Six Sigma and change management techniques within one pilot unit.
• United State Government agency used Lean Six Sigma to streamline a cumbersome reimbursement process for new hire relocation expenses. The changes eliminate the reimbursement bureaucracy for new hires and save the company $185,000 a year.
• The problem of high inventory cost of key materials was approached and solved with Lean and Six Sigma. Manufacturers now use Lean to transform their processes from making for stock to making to order.