Most of the large corporations employ a few lean experts. Many mid-size and most small businesses do not have lean manufacturing expertise in the company. However, a road map can be used with common sense. A list of steps that usually comprise a lean manufacturing road map are
- Form team (mix of lean manufacturing and relevant business experience)
- Develop communication and feedback channel for everyone
- Meet with everyone and explain the initiative
- Begin to train all employees (lean overview, eight wastes, standard operations, kaizen)
- Facility analysis – Determine the gap between current state and a state of “lean”
- 5-S – It is the foundation of lean. Workplace organization is critical for any lean initiative
- TPM – Begin Total Productive Maintenance early (used throughout lean)
- Value Stream Mapping – Determine the waste across the entire system
- 7 (or 8) waste identification – Use with value stream mapping to identify system waste
- Process mapping – A more detailed map of each process
- Takt time – Determine need to produce on all processes, equipment
- Overall equipment effectiveness and six losses – Determine the losses on all processes and equipment
- Line balance – Use, if necessary, with takt time and OEE
- SMED – Push setup times down to reduce cycle time, batch quantity and lower costs
- Pull/one-piece flow/Continuous Flow Analysis – Utilize kanban and supermarkets
- Analyze quality at the source application – Poor quality stopped at the source
- Implement error-proofing ideas
- Cellular manufacturing/layout and flow improvement – Analyze facility and each process
- Develop standardized operations – Concurrently with SMED, line balance, flow, layouts
- Kaizen – Continue improving operations, giving priority to bottlenecks within the system
The specific implementation plan should be developed from the facility analysis. The analysis identifies areas of opportunity in every area of the business, including sales, service, engineering, maintenance, production, quality, shipping and administrative functions.
Some lean manufacturing projects within a lean initiative require the tools of Six Sigma to find the improvement answers. The lean manufacturing team needs to be trained to understand when the lean tools must be supplemented to either solve the problem or maximize the improvement.
Kaizen events may use all of the lean tools (and some Six Sigma tools) to meet the team’s objective. Kaizen events are conducted on an ongoing basis to achieve a state of “lean”. For example, a process may need a quick throughput improvement. The kaizen blitz could include focused SMED and OEE analysis. The kaizen might have an objective to reduce setup time from 80 minutes to 60 minutes in four days.
It is important to keep an enterprise view with the analysis and road map. No single operation should be improved at the expense of the entire system. For example, if a bottleneck is happening at Process B, improving Process A prior to B only hurts the system worse. A larger-scale example is improving throughput if shipping cannot handle the volume. Although many improvements cause bottlenecks elsewhere, forcing a larger known problem is rarely a good idea.
The road map above is only one example. It could be shown with many different variations. However, there is a logical sequence to many of the tools. Value stream mapping is almost always conducted very early on in the process. The 5-S system provides a foundation for most other tools. TPM is large and plays an important role in OEE improvement and, therefore, must be started early.
The key is to have a plan and get started. The path to lean will not be straight and it never ends. Don’t let the pursuit of perfection get in the way of being “better” today.