Key Lean Manufacturing Principles

CIO Applications| Friday, April 23, 2021

The lean approach has transformed countless corporations, offering them a leg up on the competition and a clear path to profitability and enhanced customer experience.

FREMONT, CA:- Efficiency has never been more essential to the manufacturing sector than now. This is specifically true where higher costs of doing business place various manufacturers at a competitive disadvantage with global counterparts. How can manufacturers maximize productivity and mitigate waste enough to remain competitive in the global marketplace? For many, the answer is lean manufacturing. Lean Thinking lays out the five lean manufacturing principles. Read on to know more.

Value

The lean approach starts with a detailed understanding of what value the customer assigns to products and services. This is what decides what the customer will pay. Establishing value enables organizations to create a top-down target price. The cost to produce the products and services is then decided. The firm focuses on eliminating waste to offer the value the customer expects at the highest level of profitability.

The Value Stream

The value stream is the totality of the product’s whole life-cycle from the raw materials through to the customer’s use of, and eventual disposal of, the product. To avoid waste, the ultimate objective of Lean, there must be an accurate and complete understanding of the value stream. Operations are examined to decide what value is added. Steps, materials, features, and movements that do not add value are eliminated.

Flow

Understanding flow is critical to the elimination of waste. If the value stream stops moving forward at any point, waste is the inevitable by-product. The lean manufacturing principle of flow is about generating a value chain with no interruption in the production and a state where each activity is fully in step with every other.

Pull

The lean principle of pull assists ensures flow by ensuring that nothing is made ahead of time, building up work-in-process inventory, and stopping the flow. Rather than leveraging the conventional manufacturing method of pushing work through a forecast and schedule, the pull method dictates that nothing is made until the customer orders it. This needs a great deal of flexibility and short design to delivery cycle times. It also wants an efficient method of communicating what is required to each step in the value chain.