What is Lean Manufacturing?

Lean manufacturing is a principle applied in the development and production of products where more products are produced using less.

The key elements of Lean Operations are:

• eliminate waste,
• involve everyone,
• continuous improvement,
• implementing lean operations, and
• setup reduction

 In Japan, lean manufacturing aims at eliminating muda or waste (such as when resources are employed and little or no value is realized). 

What are the Types of Waste?

There are 7 classified types of wastes, the priority should be to avoid these wastes.

• Overproduction – making too much too early
• Waiting – Need to keep a low of material/customers
• Unnecessary Motions – ergonomics and layout
• Transporting – unnecessary movements/handling
• Processing – Too much capacity in one machine instead of a number of smaller ones
• Inventory – Raw material, work in progress and finished goods
• Defects – costs of defects tend to escalate the longer they remain undetected

What is Involving Everyone?

Lean aims to create a new culture in which all employees are encouraged to contribute to improvement efforts through generating ideas.

Organizations will provide training to staff in a wide range of areas, including techniques such as statistical process control (SPC) and more general problem solving techniques.

What is Continuous Improvement? 

Continuous Improvement, or Kaizen (Japanese term), is needed because customer‟s views are continually changing and standards are rising. Kaizen is about moving tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge.

• Tacit – "Know-How‟ is based on years of experience but may not be written down. 
• Explicit – Written down in principles and procedures. 

Continuous Improvement enables ideas held tacitly to be explicitly incorporated the organization. 

What is Implementing Lean Operations?

Implementing lean operations means meeting demand instantly, delivering perfect quality, and eliminating waste in all its forms. 

One of the ways it does this is through replacing the traditional push production system with a pull production system sometimes called, lean synchronization.‟

Other methods are efficiency in setup and total preventative maintenance.

When did Lean Manufacturing Develop?

Lean manufacturing was developed by Taiichi Ohno, an executive at Toyota Motors Company and was spread by Daniel T. Jones and James P. Womack. The Lean Manufacturing Glossary shows that the process is still being developed as more and more aspects are added to make the process better.The Toyota Production System, TPS, is one of the oldest lean manufacturing systems and what has become the basis of other systems. There are differences between other systems and TPS and it is important to understand each of the systems separately.Understanding TPS forms the basis of understanding lean manufacturing. The system aims at eliminating wastes during development and production. With this system, companies aim at producing goods on time as demand requires, at reduced production costs, faster and better than competitors and without producing waste.Lean Manufacturing forms the basis under which manufacturing improvement tools are created. 

What are Some Common Lean Manufacturing Systems?

Some of the lean manufacturing systems include:

•  SMED, Single Minute Exchange of DIE
•  5S, Visual Workplace or Visual Factory
•  TPM, Total Productive Maintenance
•  KanBan, Work Signaling System
•  Error & Mistake-Proofing
•  Materials Replenishment system, commonly known as 2Bin
•  Level-Loading/Heijunka: Appropriate for a mix of products
•  Kaizen Events
•  Inventory Reduction
•  Continuous Improvement