In the world of Lean Principles, the goal is to reduce the total time the product is in the production stream. Lean is predicated on the fact that for most manufacturing companies the amount of time the raw material are being worked on is a very small part of the total time of production. In most cases the actual time that value is being added to the raw material (the material is being changed by the manufacturing process) is less than 10% of the total time the material is in the production stream. If you don’t agree with this fact use the Value Steam mapping technique and see for your self. This exercise is eye-opening!
Accepting this relationship between value added time and non-value added time, the next step is to measure the value added time, the non-value added time and where the non-value added time occurs in the production stream. Value Stream Mapping technique is the simplest means to visually identify these factors. Once you know where the problems occur, you can address these problems.
At this point, many companies fall down. Lean Principles recommends quick solutions to problems. It is not as important to “hit a home run” as it is to make some progress. The Kaizen event is the methodology to make changes. Kaizen events are usually very short in time, often no more than a week from start of investigation to completion of the solution. The speed of the implementation of a kaizen event is a major secret to its success. The workers involved will see improvement in a very short period of time and will thus gain confidence in the lean process. You will not be dragging workers away from their regular jobs long enough to cause bottlenecks in other areas.
As soon as a kaizen event is completed and the success is measured and proven; you assemble another group of workers and start the next kaizen event. Thus, you begin to see a continuous series of improvements. After implementing a group of kaizen events your value stream process will not longer look as it did in the original value stream map. Now it is time to create a new value stream map and identify more kaizen events.
Lean Principles is a never-ending series of improvements. This means that you can not look at Lean Principles as a one-time fix to your problems. It is a true change in business philosophy. It is on-going and will continue to yield benefits in terms of faster through-put, reduced inventory, lower reject rates; better utilization of human resources and lower costs.
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