why lean
why lean Lean Manufacturing is not especially new. It is derived from the Toyota Production System or Just in Time Production, Henry Ford and other predecessors. The lineage of Lean manufacturing and Just In Time (JIT) Production goes back to Eli Whitney and the concept of interchangeable part in the 1850’s.
It was finally when Taichii Ohno and Shigeo Shingo introduced Toyota Production System which in true sense talked about lean manufacturing.
Todd(2000) defines lean production as
“initiative, whose goal is to reduce the waste in human effort, inventory, time to market,and manufacturing space to become highly responsive to customer demand while producing world class quality products in the most efficient and economical manner”.”.
Lean has evolved as a concept over time. The interest in continuous improvement led on to the notion of a Learning Organization. The culture of continuous learning is the great benefit for a lean company that opens a new opportunities for future improvements and in this way achieving sustainability in a long run.
Waste is anything other than the required equipment, materials, parts, space and working time. Lean production help companies find and eliminate waste .There are seven types of waste. These include
• overproduction;
• inventory;
• extra processing steps;
• motion
• Rework
• waiting and
• Transportation.
These wastes also increase process lead time and reduce value-added for customers
(Hines and Rich, 1997)
Lean Principles
There are 5 steps approach to becoming lean. These are the five principles of lean implementation that was specified by (Womack, Jones 1996) are accepted with key importance to successful implementation. Applying these five steps needs to happen on every organizational level and requires complete transformation of the SMEs. They are
1. Defining Customers Value
2. Map Value Stream
3. Creating Flow
4. Establishing pull and
5. Pursuit of perfection
It was finally when Taichii Ohno and Shigeo Shingo introduced Toyota Production System which in true sense talked about lean manufacturing.
Todd(2000) defines lean production as
“initiative, whose goal is to reduce the waste in human effort, inventory, time to market,and manufacturing space to become highly responsive to customer demand while producing world class quality products in the most efficient and economical manner”.”.
Lean has evolved as a concept over time. The interest in continuous improvement led on to the notion of a Learning Organization. The culture of continuous learning is the great benefit for a lean company that opens a new opportunities for future improvements and in this way achieving sustainability in a long run.
Waste is anything other than the required equipment, materials, parts, space and working time. Lean production help companies find and eliminate waste .There are seven types of waste. These include
• overproduction;
• inventory;
• extra processing steps;
• motion
• Rework
• waiting and
• Transportation.
These wastes also increase process lead time and reduce value-added for customers
(Hines and Rich, 1997)
Lean Principles
There are 5 steps approach to becoming lean. These are the five principles of lean implementation that was specified by (Womack, Jones 1996) are accepted with key importance to successful implementation. Applying these five steps needs to happen on every organizational level and requires complete transformation of the SMEs. They are
1. Defining Customers Value
2. Map Value Stream
3. Creating Flow
4. Establishing pull and
5. Pursuit of perfection