Lean manufacturing, also referred to as lean production, is simply the systematic elimination of wastes during the process of manufacturing. Lean also comprises of waste that is created through overburden as well as waste as a result of unevenness in loads of work. Working from a client’s perspective, who usually consumes a particular service or product, ‘value’ refers to any process or action which a customer is likely to be willing to pay for.
Essentially then, lean is majored in adding the concentration of what is valuable to a product while minimizing everything else that does not add any value to the product.
Australian Lean Manufacturing Goals and Strategy
Espoused goals of lean production systems range widely. In Australia to be particular, there are some who believe that lean manufacturing is meant to increase an organization’s profit while others are of the opinion that there need to be more improvements done in this industry so as to benefit the customer.
The following are commonly mentioned lean manufacturing goals:
- Improve quality- For the sake of staying competitive in the contemporary society’s marketplace, an organization ought to come to understand its market’s needs as well as wants and consequently design relevant processes geared to meeting the particular requirements and expectations of the customers.
- Get rid of waste – Waste in this context is any activity that takes a lot of resources, time or space but which is not of any value as far as the ultimate service or product is concerned.
- Minimize time – Minimizing the amount of time that is takes so as to complete a task from the beginning to the end is a very effective manner of getting rid of wastes while at the same time lowering total costs of manufacturing. The result is reduced cost of production which benefits a company.
- Reduces total costs – An organization is obliged to produce only to the demand of a consumer if it is going to minimize on costs. This is because overproduction does, by a large extent, increase the inventory costs of a company since more storage is needed among other more expenses which come with handling a lot of items.
Strategic elements of lean production can relatively be quite complicated and comprising of multiple elements. There however have been identified four different notions about lean:
- As a fixed goal or state (being lean)
- As a change process that is lean (developing into lean)
- As a set of methods or tools (doing toolbox lean)
- As a philosophy (thinking about lean)
Steps to Achieving Lean Production Systems
Below are steps that ought to be followed during implementation of lean systems so as to create excellent ones:
- First of all come up with a simple system of manufacturing
- Recognize the presence of room for improvement
- In a continuous manner, improve your design of lean production system
A major principle of Australian Lean Manufacturing is the demand-based flow kind of manufacturing. In this setting of production, the inventory gets pulled through each and every production center only when it’s required to meet an order of a customer.