Lean manufacturing is defined by Wikipedia as:

“Lean manufacturing, lean enterprise, or lean production, often simply, ‘Lean’, is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, ‘value’ is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for.”

With that said, here are five highly effective lean manufacturing tools you can use in your quest towards the elimination of waste in your manufacturing processes.

1.) 5S – 5S stands for Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain. The idea behind this tool is to create an organized work area, thus helping to eliminate wasted time and energy. Implementing 5S is a great place to start when kicking off a lean manufacturing program.

2.) Bottleneck Analysis – A bottleneck analysis looks for those areas within a process where capacity limitations cause constraints that slow the entire production down. This analysis is used to help remove identified bottlenecks, thus making the whole procedure more efficient.

3.) Root Cause Analysis – This type of analysis looks to find the primary cause of an issue in order to more effetively solve the real problem rather than applying short term fixes to an issue.

A common way of carrying out a root cause analysis is to ask “why” five times to dig deeper and deeper into the issue until the root cause is found.

For example:

“Our widgets are coming out damaged…” (Why?) “Because the widget press is not functioning correctly…” (Why?) “Because the machine has not been serviced in quite a while…” (Why?) “Because our service department doesn’t receive the feedback as to when to service the machine…” (Why?) “Because we don’t have a procedure in place noting who should inform the service department of which machines need servicing and how often.”

4.) Kaizen – Kaizen is a concept that revolves around the idea of continuous improvement. I was originally put into action by Japanese companies a few decades ago. In this lean manufacturing tool, employees are given the authority and ability to work together to systematically and continuously improve processes in small, incremental steps.



5.) Just-in-Time (JIT) – More than just a buzzword, JIT is the idea of pulling, rather than pushing component parts through a manufacturing process. The just-in-time process assures that component parts arrive exactly when needed, rather than too soon or too late, which would be inefficient and create waste.

Hopefully the lean manufacturing tools mentioned here will be the fuel your company needs to get your lean initiative kicked off on the right foot!

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