What are the main reasons to introduce Lean manufacturing into your business?

One of the primary reasons for introducing Lean manufacturing techniques is to review the company’s processes and strip out those activities that don’t increase customer satisfaction, improve the product, or add efficiency. This leaves the company free to concentrate on those activities that add value such as creating Rubber Moulding like those that are produced by https://www.meadex.co.uk/.

Let’s look at four ways to add value quickly.

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End-to-end streamlining

With Lean techniques, you map processes right across the company, from an order being received, to the customer-bound delivery. This view is different from the work of many experts, who concentrate on just those areas in which they have expertise – order processing, manufacturing or warehouse management. When management takes a view of the whole workflow, they often discover reworks, redundant tasks and unnecessary steps. For example, they may find that they are under-employing someone at one point in the process, and under-employing another person at another point. Obviously, it’s time to look at whether one person could carry out both functions.

This streamlining should both cut costs and speed up the process of getting products to the customer.

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Stopping wasteful practices

The Lean philosophy is big on eliminating wastefulness, with a list of nine contexts in which waste occurs. Obviously, stopping waste is a step to a more profitable company but Lean’s categorisation of waste into nine areas helps companies look at where they might be generating waste and losing money, without really realising it. The nine areas are: overproducing, processing, creativity, inventory, motion, transportation, information, quality and waiting time. In order to find out where you are wasting time or products you need to carry out a full audit of your process and procedures as well as looking at items that you are throwing away and those that you frequently need to stock up on. This will give you a good starting point for deciding whether or not you need to look at your working practices and buying habits.

Boosting commitment in teams

Teams need to be involved in the process of analysing the company’s operations and moving to a Lean model. Their engagement in this will build more productive and closer teams. There is an opportunity here to give at least some of the teams some introductory Lean training, so that they feel they are adding to their skillset.

Continuous improvement

This is the idea that Lean is never achieved, and that there are always more ways to become leaner. Leaning the company is, therefore, a never ending job.