What is lean manufacturing?
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Design for lean manufacturing is based on the premise that product and process design is an ongoing activity and not a one-time activity; therefore design for lean manufacturing should be viewed as a long term strategy for an organization. Design for lean manufacturing must be sustainable and holistic unlike other lean manufacturing or Six Sigma approaches that either tackle only a part of the problem or tackle the problem for a short period of time. Design for lean manufacturing also relates to system thinking as it considers all aspects (or the full circle) and takes the system conditions into consideration when designing products and services, delivering them according to customer needs. ® (Munro & Associates) drives prevention of waste by adopting a systematic process to improve the design phase during development. An organizational focus is required for the implementation of Lean Design ® principles, which includes efficient and sustainable design team. Initial studies of the Japanese approach to design for lean manufacturing noted four principles; leadership of projects by a shusa (or project boss), tightly knit teams, communication on all of the difficult design trade-offs, and simultaneous development between engineering and manufacturing. Further study showed additional depth to the principles, citing 13 principles specific to the Toyota design for lean manufacturing methods in product and process development in the areas of process, skilled people, and tools and technology. As the practice of design for lean manufacturing has expanded in its depth and breadth of application, additional principles have been integrated into the method.To be successful, a corporate wide design for lean manufacturing implementation typically includes the following dimensions:
Design for lean manufacturing
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Lean Consumption is based on Lean Manufacturing, also known as Lean Production. Lean Manufacturing was pioneered by Toyota founder Taiichi Ohno, and revolutionized and streamlined the manufacturing industry. Whereas Lean Manufacturing set out ways to streamline manufacturing processes, Lean Consumption "minimizes customers' time and effort by delivering exactly what they want when and where they want it". Processes are focused on eliminating waste, while increasing productivity, speed of operation and improving customer interaction.
Lean consumption
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Lean manufacturing or lean production, often simply "lean", is a systematic method for waste minimization (known by"Muda") within a manufacturing system without sacrificing productivity, which can cause problems. Lean also takes into account waste created through overburden ( the "Muri") and waste created through unevenness in work loads (the "Mura"). Working from the perspective of the client who consumes a product or service, "value" is any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for.
Lean manufacturing
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Lean manufacturing is different from lean enterprise. Recent research reports the existence of several lean manufacturing processes but of few lean enterprises. One distinguishing feature opposes lean accounting and standard cost accounting. For standard cost accounting, SKUs are difficult to grasp. SKUs include too much hypothesis and variance, i.e., SKUs hold too much indeterminacy. Manufacturing may want to consider moving away from traditional accounting and adopting lean accounting. In using lean accounting, one expected gain is activity-based cost visibility, i.e., measuring the direct and indirect costs at each step of an activity rather than traditional cost accounting that limits itself to labor and supplies.
Lean manufacturing
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Manufacturing companies, including medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers, operate in highly regulated environments which often necessitate a great deal of resources, time, and money being expended in the testing, release, and quality assurance of their products. Since the early 1990s, there has been a more widespread drive to adopt more lean approaches both in the manufacturing and testing of products. The advances in lean thinking developed and refined in the automotive industry initially by Toyota (TPS) are now being used as best practices across most manufacturing sectors. The idea of lean laboratory shares its origins with lean manufacturing and uses the same tools to deliver the most efficient and least wasteful processes, tools such as Kaizen, Just In Time (JIT), Heijunka, Kanban, and Six Sigma.
Lean laboratory
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Not to be confused with "Lean Design" (copyrighted and patented by Munro & Associates, of Michigan), design for lean manufacturing builds on the set of principles that emerged from design for the customer value and design for manufacturability. Since some lean tools are used in the practice of design for lean manufacturing, it borrows the first word in its name from lean manufacturing as exemplified by the Toyota Production System. Design for lean manufacturing was first coined by Womack, Jones, and Roos after studying the differences between conventional development at American automotive companies and lean methods at Japanese automobile producers. While lean manufacturing focuses on optimization of the production stream and removal of wastes (commonly referred to as muda, mura, and muri) once the value stream has been created, Lean Design ® (Munro & Associates)concerns itself with methods and techniques to create a lean solution from the start, resulting in more value and fewer wastes across the value stream. Lean design ® seeks to optimize the development process through rapid learning cycles to build and test multiple concepts early. Managing the knowledge value stream, systematic problem solving with analysis of the trade-offs between various design options, and solutions generated from ideas filtered by systematic innovation methods are viewed as methods within the lean design process.
Design for lean manufacturing
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Agile manufacturing is seen as the next step after lean manufacturing in the evolution of production methodology. The key difference between the two is like between a thin and an athletic person, agile being the latter. One can be neither, one or both. In manufacturing theory, being both is often referred to as leagile.
According to Martin Christopher, when companies have to decide what to be, they have to look at the customer order cycle (COC) (the time the customers are willing to wait) and the leadtime for getting supplies. If the supplier has a short lead time, lean production is possible. If the COC is short, agile production is beneficial.
Agile manufacturing
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Design for lean manufacturing is a process for applying lean concepts to the design phase of a system, such as a complex product or process. The term describes methods of design in lean manufacturing companies as part of the study of Japanese industry by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the time of the study, the Japanese automakers were outperforming the American counterparts in speed, resources used in design, and design quality. Conventional mass-production design focuses primarily on product functions and manufacturing costs; however,design for lean manufacturing systematically widens the design equation to include all factors that will determine a product's success across its entire value stream and life-cycle. One goal is to reduce waste and maximize value, and other goals include improving the quality of the design and the reducing the time to achieve the final solution. The method has been used in architecture, healthcare, product development, processes design, information technology systems, and even to create lean business models. It relies on the definition and optimization of values coupled with the prevention of wastes before they enter the system. Design for lean manufacturing is system design.
Design for lean manufacturing
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One criticism of lean is that its practitioners may focus on tools and methodologies rather than on the philosophy and culture of lean. Consequently, adequate management is needed in order to avoid failed implementation of lean methodologies. Another pitfall is that management decides what solution to use without understanding the true problem and without consulting shop floor personnel. As a result, lean implementations often look good to the manager but fail to improve the situation.
Lean manufacturing
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After adopting the lean approach, both managers and employees experience change. Therefore, decisive leaders are needed when starting on a lean journey. There are several requirements to control the lean journey. First and most importantly, experts recommend that the organization have its own lean plan, developed by the lean Leadership. In other words, the lean team provides suggestions for the leader who then makes the actual decisions about what to implement. Second, coaching is recommended when the organization starts off on its lean journey. They will impart their knowledge and skills to shopfloor staff and the lean implementation will be much more efficient. Third, the metrics or measurements used for measuring lean and improvements are extremely important. It will enable collection of the data required for informed decision-making by a leader. One cannot successfully implement lean without sufficient aptitude at measuring the process and outputs. To control and improve results going forward, one must see and measure, i.e. map, what is happening now.
Lean manufacturing