It’s an unfortunate fact of the manufacturing life that customers are increasingly demanding lower costs for seemingly perfectly produced products, and delivered on-time—every time. And, never mind the excuses for not performing. Today, customer loyalty is often a vacuous concept and any dissatisfaction at all simply becoming a matter of clients moving along to next vendor in line who promises the desired delivery. At its root, the bane of most manufacturers is excessively long order-to-delivery cycle times, even when efforts have been made to streamline production systems.

In lean models of manufacturing, wasted time means wasted opportunities to gain efficiency. Evidence of the waste of time is everywhere in the system and often takes the form of waiting for something to happen. The shop floor waits on sales orders to get processed, machine operators wait for engineering documents to update or clear, bottlenecks form in the production line, material delivery is slowed during inventory searches, and the list of waiting maladies goes on and on. Just remember that waiting—any waiting—keeps making the order-to-delivery cycle time longer than it really needs to be. And, longer order-to-delivery cycle times nibble into valuable, and narrower, margins.

Another factor in extending the order-to-delivery cycle time, to the point of bottom-line profit erosion, is that (more…)

It was once a giant leap forward for a growing job shop to move from manual stock control and accounting of shop operations to something a bit more computerized, such as Excel spreadsheets. In time, though, the rising business experienced even more expansion and with it the need to bring all facets of the operation into a single-source system of information control. Now, spreadsheets with old information delivered from diverse sources all around the shop simply would no longer work. Constant issues of organization, freshness of data, lack of real time information flow challenged efficiency. The time eventually came for total enterprise resource planning, or ERP.

The installation of a system-wide, ERP software solution is not a simple task. To succeed, the project has several needs that must be satisfied in order for payback to come to fruition. Indeed, implementation of a new ERP system means dedication to the project by all employees—without their diligence in using it only partial rewards will be gained. First and foremost among the ERP implementation needs is an executive championing the project. In short, ERP implementation is not just an IT project—it’s a (more…)

It’s a given that in manufacturing today, your customers are more demanding and insist on only the best products at lower prices, and delivered in the shortest time. If this is what you’re facing as a production reality (and, no doubt you are doing so in today’s pressing economy), streamlining your operation is of absolute necessity in meeting customer demands. In streamlining, a manufacturer engages processes that are not always the fastest but rather those with the fewest production activities that do not add value to the product. That is to say, streamlining is a transformative event in which the product becomes improved through a process (or processes).

Whether it’s milling a chunk of wood into a table leg, or creating a child’s lunchbox out of pressed metal, hinges, decals, and screws, creating a useful product from basic elements/efforts is adding value to it. To identify and eliminate (or at least reduce) non-value-added activity in production are the keys to streamlining a manufacturing process, and by extension the decreasing of largely unnecessary production/management costs.

Streamlining a manufacturing operation is not a complicated thing—and the benefits of even implementing the basic efforts at the process far outweigh the costs of doing so. You can begin by first getting an idea of how your operation is flowing. Imagine your production operation as (more…)

So, you think your job shop is completely lean? Or, perhaps, you’re ready to go lean but are lacking a sense of which direction you need to turn to start the transition. In either case, the one absolute rule to remember is that no manufacturer or job shop can ever be perfectly lean. As an integral element of its philosophy, continuous improvement implies that refinement in processes—from efficiencies in movement to the reduction of waste—can always be found. The bottom-line is that unless every activity of the company adds value to the product of that company, there will be areas of continuous lean improvement to be found.

Knowing that the job will never be completely finished, but realizing there are going to be positive returns from the effort, you decide to jump in and make the transition into leaning your operation. Where do you start? You start from the ground up—you turn toward your people to believe in the effort, for without their positive attitude no lean project can succeed. From there, lean movement will spread in the way business gets done. In other words, the human touch is something no machine can do on its own. For lean to be successful, the workforce must be invested in the lean process in order to identify both large and small workflow and waste problems. The workforce through understanding and agreement, not coercion, must adopt lean principles.

One of the biggest misconceptions about going lean is that (more…)

As a manufacturer, plant manager, controller, or machine operator, you’ve undoubtedly encountered the concept of lean production. Lean this, lean that—lectures, brochures, talks, forums about how lean approaches to shop management can control and even reduce costs. In today’s era of ever tightening margins, where even the slightest gains in efficiency can translate into considerable improvements to the bottom-line, lean manufacturing has become not only a way of life but also a philosophy in and of itself. Imagine the repetitive production line where pennies saved per part or assembly sometimes translate into thousands of dollars per hour put back into the plus side of the ledger.

In prior postings, we’ve listed benefits of leaning, as well as some of the broad waste concepts associated with lean philosophy in manufacturing. In this article, we will nuance some of items in those prior lists and offer more specifics as to the meaning of “waste” in production. With an eye toward operating within a lean structure, identifying potential areas of waste and continuously improving production through their elimination is what efficient manufacturing is all about:

Over-Production – In short, selling products at or below cost of production is (more…)