Lean manufacturing is a business performance improvement tool that focuses on enhancing quality, cost, delivery, and people. It helps expose waste and makes continuous improvement possible by identifying and eliminating non-value-adding activities in design, production, supply chain and management.
Striving to improve competitiveness by providing customers faster and better products or services, which will accomplish more than worrying about the next global crisis, is the basic aim behind lean manufacturing. The only game we need to be adept at today is the one that removes waste so the customer sees more value.
In the world of lean manufacturing, companies try to produce only what has been demanded by the customer, and only when the product is required. To optimize benefits of lean throughout the supply chain, it is essential to build a partnership with your suppliers. This partnership must work on the basic principle that you pull only what you consume, and nothing more. Your suppliers restore what you have consumed. In this way, inventories are maintained at their smallest for both dealer and customer.
Achieving this level of trust with your supplier will require frequent communication and extensive sharing of information. Successful partnerships result from inviting each other to strategic planning sessions, attending each other’s events and participating in other joint activities.
Unlike many manufacturing trends, lean manufacturing appears to be here to stay. However, many firms are still struggling to figure out how to make lean manufacturing work for them. The title itself implies that companies will emerge from the program leaner than when they began. The term manufacturing suggests that the program targets the manufacturing process, thereby making the products more consumer-friendly.
One good approach is to weave principles, objectives, tools, and methodology behind lean manufacturing into the strategic and business plans of your organization, in order to make lean manufacturing more suitable for your company.
