Savannah Jackson

What is lean manufacturing? Lean manufacturing is a process of turning your business from wasting time, energy, space, and money into an efficient workforce which reduces all waste for the betterment of your profit, as well as for your customers. Another description of lean manufacturing would also be using less work while still maintaining top value. Lean manufacturing is not a one-time process which, once you have completed the steps you are finished. Rather, it is ongoing, requiring frequent checks to make sure everything is staying implemented to ensure your business is running smoothly. While it is an ongoing process, the effort it takes to maintain lean manufacturing far outweighs—and is significantly smaller than—the work involved in keeping up unorganized, wasteful business processes. Two of the biggest goals with lean manufacturing are to improve quality and to eliminate waste. Improving quality involves being aware of what your customers are looking for, as well as continually making that product better so you not only keep your customers, you but also gain more. Eliminating waste means throwing out and reorganizing items or activities which waste either materials or time and provide no true value to the workplace. Lean manufacturing include taking notice of what wastes occur through out the business. Only when the wastes have been noted can they be dealt with. Lean manufacturing organizes waste into seven different categories—transport, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, over processing, and defects. There are various ways to incorporate lean manufacturing. One is through the 5S system, which immediately targets and eliminates areas of waste before organizing the areas to be efficient. It is probably the simplest of the lean manufacturing methods, and is easy to get everyone on the workforce actively involved. Another method is Kaizen, which is what Toyota is famous for using to create the booming automobile industry it is today. Essentially, the Kaizan method has every worker step back and study how their job is performed to target areas which could be eliminated or improved to make the process go more simply and faster. As every person is involved and is looking at their own field of work, they can best know how to target problem areas and get them solved. Together, this makes an entire business run much efficiently. To implement lean manufacturing in your business, you will need to take some preparation time previous to introducing it to your employees. Once it is introduced, you will need to train every individual and make them aware of how important it is that they all work together to make lean manufacturing possible. A detailed plan will need to be drawn up as to how to train workers, as well as how to effectively integrate—and keep—lean manufacturing techniques. Lean methods can work in any area of business to help turn production positively around.