When people try to think of things like lean manufacturing, they would presume that lean manufacturing is something related to doing few things and get job done easily. However, the most important principle of this kind of manufacturing strategy is to get more with doing less.
It is not something related to finding shortcuts. Instead, it would be about reducing the wastes and still maintain a certain level of production efficiency. Yes, it means that you are going to use fewer resources to finish the same job. What is waste? It is something that is not directly used or needed to finish a job.
It can be in form of movements, meaning that you might need to walk from here to there to finish a part of the job. It can also mean wasted handling, in which you would have to send the products to several places and make it eventually. On the other hand, it can also be related to excessive inventory. It means that you are trying to store up a lot of things and you actually do not need to store so much. As a result, you would need to pay a lot of money for warehousing and you need manpower to handle the checking and packaging of products.
Up to this point, you may think that lean manufacturing means that people should try to pack everything into one at one point and specialization should not be implemented. However, the fact is that specialization and lean manufacturing are not mutually exclusive.
Lean manufacturing means that you should try to save some wasteful steps or resources and you are going to achieve more. Sometimes, modern managers believe too much in job specializations and they would always try to implement this kind of technique in production. This leads to serious problem. Some of the jobs are divided into too small pieces and it would be stupid for people to do those steps separately.
Yes, lean manufacturing deals with this kind of problem. It would try to solve the problem by combining those small steps and make the steps more cost-effective. But for some steps which have been well defined, lean manufacturing is not needed.
In order to implement the lean manufacturing process in a smooth way, people would have to check and analyze the steps in a production carefully. This is a challenging job to most of the managers. Yes, they may not know a lot about lean manufacturing and they might need to start from the beginning. They would need to check the manufacturing processes and find whether it is possible to combine some of the small parts. They might try to assign some employees to use the lean manufacturing method while the others should use the traditional production method. This can allow them to compare the possibility of combining different kinds of production steps and achieve positive results for the company eventually. If you want to know more, you surely should try to visit the internet because there are plenty of useful websites.