Lean Manufacturing

By: Anitha
Balasubramaniam
 Lean Manufacturing
By: Anitha Balasubramaniam

Lean manufacturing is an operational strategy oriented towards achieving the shortest possible cycle time by
eliminating wastes. It is derived from the Toyota production system and its key thrust is to increase the value
added work by eliminating waste and reducing incidental work. The term lean manufacturing is coined to
represent half the human effort in the company, half the manufacturing space, half the investment in tools
and half the engineering hours to develop a new product in half the time. These benefits can be achieved
only if the concept is religiously followed in the organization. In simple lean is manufacturing without waste.

Objective Of Lean

The basic objective of lean is to minimize the waste, and continuous improvement in every stage of product
by utilizing minimum time and cost. Lean manufacturing focuses on reduction of all kind of waste to make
continuous flow of the work, reduce the cycle time, reduce the transportation, eliminate the non value added
process, reduce the motion of workers by providing proper location of tools and parts, minimize the
transportation, maximize the utilization of machines and reduce the inventory in the production space

Lean Manufacturing Concept

Lean manufacturing is the total business approach designed to identify and eliminate forms of waste in the
process of producing goods, services, or combinations of both. It is a team based approach to identify and
eliminate waste through continuous improvement.

Any activity that adds cost or time without value to the service we offer to our customers is called waste.
Waste is any resource which does not add value to the product being manufactured.

There are seven kinds of waste:

1. Transportation (moving products that is not actually required to perform the processing)
2. Inventory (all components, work-in-progress and finished product not being processed)
3. Motion (people or equipment moving or walking more than is required to perform the processing)
4. Waiting (waiting for the next production step)
5. Overproduction (production ahead of demand)
6. Over Processing (due to poor tool or product design creating activity)
7. Defects (the effort involved in inspecting for and fixing defects)

The Seven Wastes:

1. Over Production:

Producing more than the customer demands. The corresponding lean principle is to manufacture based
upon a pull system or producing just as customers order them. Anything produced beyond these ties up
valuable labor and material resources that might otherwise be used to respond to customer demand.

2. Waiting:

This includes waiting for material, information, equipment, tools, etc. lean demands that all resources are
provided on a just in time (JIT) basis-not too soon, not too late.

3. Motion:

Unnecessary motion is caused by poor workflow, poor layout, house keeping, and inconsistent or
undocumented work methods. Value stream mapping is used to identify this type of waste.

4. Defects:

Production defects and service errors waste resources in four ways. First, materials are consumed. Second,
the labor used to produce the part (or provide the service) the first time cannot be recovered. Third, labor is
required to rework the product (or redo the service).fourth, labor is required to address any forthcoming
customer complaints

5. Transportation:

Materials should be delivered to its point of use. Instead of raw materials being shipped from the vendor to a
receiving location, processed, moved into a warehouse, and then transported to the assembly line. Lean
demands that the material be shipped directly from the vendor to the location in the assembly line where it
will be used. The lean term for this technique is called point-of-use storage (POUS).

6. Inventory:

Related to over production, inventory beyond that needed to meet customer demands negatively impacts
cash flow and uses valuable floor space. One of the most important benefits for lean principles is the
elimination or postponement of plans for expansion of warehouse space.

7.Over Processing:

Some of the more common examples of this are reworking (the product or service should have been done
correctly the first time), debarring (parts should have been produced without burrs, with properly designed
and maintained tooling), and inspecting (parts should have been produced using statistical process control
techniques to eliminate or minimize the amount of inspection required). A technique called value stream
mapping is frequently used to help identify non value added steps in the process (for both manufacturers
and service organizations).
Principles Of Lean Manufacturing:

There are five basic principles to implement lean management. They are:

Lean tools

Tool About the Tool

A methodology for organizing, cleaning, developing, and

sustaining a productive work environment. Improved safety,
5S ownership of workspace, improved productivity and improved
maintenance are some of the benefits of 5S program.

Error Proofing is a structured approach to ensure quality and

error free manufacturing environment. Error proofing assures
Poka –yoke
that defects will never be passed to next operation.

Is a problem-analysis tool, aids to examine cause and effect

Current Reality Trees logic behind our current situation.
 Is used to resolve hidden conflicts that usually perpetuate
Conflict Resolution Diagram chronic problems.

Is a sufficiency based logic structure designed to reveal how

Future Reality Diagram
Inventory Turnover Rate
changes to the status quo would affect reality - specifically to
produce desired effects.
The number of times an inventory cycles or turns over during
the year. A frequently used method to compute inventory
turnover is to divide average inventory level into annual cost
of sales.

A philosophy of manufacturing based on planned elimination

of all waste and continuous improvement of productivity. It
JIT encompasses the successful execution of all manufacturing
activities required to produce a final product.

The Japanese term for improvement; continuing

improvement involving everyone - managers and workers. In
Kaizen
manufacturing kaizen relates to finding and eliminating waste
in machinery, labor or production methods.

Kanban is a simple parts-movement system that depends on

cards and boxes/containers to take parts from one
workstation to another on a production line. The essence of
Kanban the Kanban concept is that a supplier or the warehouse
should only deliver components to the production line as and
when they are needed, so that there is no storage in the
production area.

Lean metrics allow companies to measure evaluate and

respond to their performance in a balanced way, without
sacrificing the quality to meet quantity objectives, or
Lean Metric increasing inventory levels to achieve machine efficiencies.
The type of the lean metric depends on the organization and
can be of following categories; Financial performance,
behavioural performance and core process performance.

One-piece flow or continuous flow processing is a concept

means that items are processed and moved directly from one
processing step to the next, one piece at a time. One-piece
One-piece Flow
flow helps to maximum utilization of resources, shorten lead
times, and identify problems and communication between
operations.

Measures the availability, performance efficiency, and quality

Overall Equipment rate of equipment - it is especially important to calculate OEE
Effectiveness for the constrained operations.

Is a logical structure designed to identify all obstacles and the

responses needed to overcome them in realizing an
Prerequisite Tree objective? It identifies minimum necessary conditions without
which the objective cannot be met.
 Shows what machines and equipment are needed for
processing a component or assembly. These tables aid in
Process Route Table creating ordinary lines and grouping work pieces into work
cells.

Quick changeover is a technique to analyze and reduce

resources needed for equipment setup, including exchange
Quick Changeover of tools and dies. Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED) is
an approach to reduce output and quality losses due to
changeovers.

The length of time that should be required to set up a given

machine or operation and run one part, assembly, batch, or
Standard Rate or Work end product through that operation. This time is used in
determining machine requirements and labour requirements.

The time required between completions of successive units

Takt Time of end product. Takt time is used to pace lines in the
production environments.

A management philosophy that can be viewed as three

separate but interrelated areas - logistics, performance
measurement, and logical thinking. TOC focuses the
Theory of Constraints
organizations scarce resources on improving the
performance of the true constraint, and therefore the bottom
line of the organization.

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a maintenance

program concept, which brings maintenance into focus in
Total Productive Maintenance order to minimize downtimes and maximize equipment
usage. The goal of TPM is to avoid emergency repairs and
keep unscheduled maintenance to a minimum.

The Toyota production system is a technology of

comprehensive production management. The basic idea of
this system is to maintain a continuous flow of products in
factories in order to flexibly adapt to demand changes. The
realization of such production flow is called Just-in-time
Toyota Production System
production, which means producing only necessary units in a
necessary quantity at a necessary time. As a result, the
excess inventories and the excess work force will be
naturally diminished, thereby achieving the purposes of
increased productivity and cost reduction.

Is a cause and effect logic tree designed to provide step-by-

Transition Tree step progress from initiation to completion of a course of
action or change. It is an implementation tool.

Value added to Non-value Provides insight on how many value added activities are
added Lead time ratio performed compared to non value added activities, using
time as a unit of measure.

Value stream mapping is a graphical tool that helps you to

see and understand the flow of the material and information
Value Stream Mapping as a product makes its way through the value stream. It ties
together lean concepts and techniques.
 Value Stream Costing methodology simplifies the accounting
process to give everyone real information in a basic
understandable format. By isolating all fixed costs along with
direct labour we can easily apply manufacturing resources as
a value per square footage utilized by a particular cell or
Value Stream Costing
value stream. This methodology of factoring gives a true
picture of cellular consumption to value-added throughput for
each value stream company wide. Now you can easily focus
improvement kaizen events where actual problems exist for
faster calculated benefits and sustainability.

Is a set of techniques that makes operation standards visible

so that workers can follow them more easily? These
Visual Management
techniques expose waste so that it can be prevented and
eliminated.

Shows the movement of material, identifying areas of waste.

Aids teams to plan future improvements, such as one piece
Workflow Diagram
flow and work cells.

Lean Construction:

Lean construction supplements traditional construction management approaches with:

(1) Two critical and necessary dimensions for successful capital project delivery by requiring the deliberate
consideration of material and information flow and value generation in a production system; and

(2) Different project and production management (planning-execution-control) paradigms.While Lean

Construction’s main tool for improvement in construction is the Last Planner System (see below), other lean
tools already proven in manufacturing have been adapted to the construction industry with equal success.
These include: 5S, Kanban, Kaizen events, quick setup/changeover, Poka Yoke, Visual Control and Five
Whys (Mastroianni and Abdelhamid 2003, Salem et al. 2005). Other Lean tools may prove useful once
tested in construction.

Cain suggests lean construction be defined by six goals of construction best practice:

1. Finished building will deliver maximum functionality, which includes delighted end users.
2. End Users will benefit from the lowest optimum cost of ownership.
3. Inefficiency and waste in the use of labor and materials will be eliminated.
4. Specialist suppliers will be involved in design from the outset to achieve integration and build ability.
5. Design and construction will be through a single point of contact for the most effective co-ordination
and clarity of responsibility.
6. Current performance and improvement achievements will be established by measurement.

"One can think of Lean Construction in a way similar to mesoeconomics. Lean Construction draws upon the
principles of project-level management and upon the principles that govern production-level management.
Lean Construction recognizes that any successful project undertaking will inevitably involve the interaction
between project and production management.

Benefits Of Lean:

The major benefits of lean manufacturing are:

• Lead time reduction

• Inventory reduction
• Cost reduction
• Floor space reduction
• New product development in the least possible time.
• Time reduction in production of existing products.
 • On time delivery
• Improved response to market.
• Accountability.
• Better use of equipment and manpower.
• Improved quality.
• Improved work flow.
• Job satisfaction.
• Flexibility.
• Predictability.
• Team work.
• Less conflicts.

Barriers for Lean Implementation

The following have been identified as the barriers for implementing lean.

• Lack of awareness
• Lack of interest.
• Shortage of basic infrastructure
• Wasteful movement due to a larger distance between supporting departments like personnel,
payrolls, canteen, etc.
• No regular and proper training to workmen and officers.
• While implementing lean in initial stage, some production will be distributed.
• More work in progress waiting for availability of next facility to carry out next operation.
• Time wasting during drifting tools from one place to another.
• Wrong concept about lean among employees.

About the Author:

The author is a lecturer at Angel College of engineering