The Basics of Lean Manufacturing

Lean manufacturing is about the elimination of waste that occurs in the process of production. It's a continual process, one that demands analysis of every single activity on both the shop floor and in the offices.

Examples of waste include:

• Over-production
• Wasting time
• Producing a part to the wrong specification
• Creating excess scrap
• Excess motion of operators
• Creating too much inventory

In contrast, grinding, boring or polishing add value.

To give some historical perspective on lean manufacturing, here's how manufacturing worked as recently as 20 years ago.  It's quite inefficient.

Here's a model of lean production today.

Getting from the old way to the new way is the hard part. Here are a few of the techniques:

• Cells, or cellular manufacturing
• Standardized work, a type of best practice for each and every operation
• Value stream mapping, which creates a physical drawing of how work flows to help employees understand what creates value and where waste is located
• Visual controls to modulate the flow of work
• Pull systems so employees receive only the parts of work that they need
   

You can learn more about lean manufacturing by viewing our lean links.