If you are in manufacturing you would have heard about LEAN manufacturing; the common name for the Toyota Production System. Lean manufacturing has a set of successful solutions LEAN manufacturing product for much lower manufacturing cost. We help businesses and operations adopt the most effective Lean strategy and use the best Lean practices and methods with a full range of Lean Consultant services, including: Lean construction, Lean Mining, Lean in Airline.

What is Lean?

Toyota Production System has three Japanese words that describe conditions for Kaizen or Continuous Improvement. These are key concepts that describe waste; Muri (overburden or unreasonableness) and Mura (unevenness, inconsistency in physical matter or human spiritual condition.) Muda(non Value adding activities, waste or unproductive),  Waste is describes those activities which do not add value and are not essential (Non Value Add) (Value added – Those activities that alter the product and the customer is prepared to pay for them. Muda is broken down in terms of Seven Deadly Forms of Waste:

Defect/Rework / Scrap

Carrying out any repair or rectification following standard work

Overproduction

Making more than customer needs- Understand customer specifications, build what the customer need, when it is needed and the quantity needed

Waiting

Waiting for anything or anybody that prevents you carrying out your standard task –this can be eliminated by redesigning machine, workspace, visual process to support operators

Non-utilised Resource (Talent)

Transportation

The movement of stock from storage point to storage point including point of use.

Inventory  WIP – Having either excessive or insufficient stock to meet the customer’s daily requirements -What to look for clutter, parts not being work on, this is often a symptom of other forms of waste- By eliminating the waste and the inventory will not be needed.

Motion / Movement – What to look for, distances people walk and people moving and not touching parts

Excessive movement of an operator during any given process

Excess Processing

To carry out any task using more resource than is the minimum requirement

What is not Waste?

There are those activities that are essential, but add no value to the product (payroll preparation or in-process quality inspection are examples)

Why it is important?

The most important aspect of lean is ability to see, identify and categorize the activities which are;

  1. Value added –
  2. Non-value added –

How do you eliminate waste?

Continuous reduction of non-value added or elimination of waste activities allow one to focus on the customer. The waste elimination activities form the basis of lean manufacturing of continuous improvement program and a through adoption of best practice principles.

Our Approach

Organisation Review

Our engagements begin with a discussion about you and your needs, followed by an Assessment of your current state during a site visit. Organisation assessment helps leaders to understand the current states from the shopfloor, gauges alignment and understands the gaps. This assessment also allows management teams to quickly and easily diagnose their strengths and weaknesses relative to the world benchmark. There is two ways of conducting organisation assessment:

Listening to the employees in order to define the current culture by using appropriate survey tools and structured interviews

The Diagnostic Tools: diagnostic are sent to client to the organisation before commencing the first workshop. An investigation of the current situation, reviewing strategies, directions, key metrics, and specific Value Streams. This investigation is conducted through interviewing process, data analysis and culture & Lean surveys.

A Senior Consultant will conduct or facilitated workshop involving the key stakeholder group in an organisation. In this workshop, the group score themselves on a scale of 0-5 against each of the “best practice” criteria

Bottom-line Checklist

Regardless of your first steps, every activity from this point forward has the dual purpose of getting positive Bottom-line Results, and teaching your workforce how to analyze and improve the processes they own

Please contact us if are interested in running a Diagnostic Workshop.

Organizational Lean Transformation

The basic steps to implement lean are: