What to Expect from Lean Manufacturing?

Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy that pursues the continuous elimination of waste in all business processes though Kaizen, also known as small and incremental improvement.  Some of the typical results achieved by Lean Implementation were like:

  • Lead Time Reduction by >50% - Cell Manufacturing & Pull Production, Load Leveling, Small Batch Production, Raw material Kanban,

  • Inventory reduction >30% - Kanban for Raw Material & Finished Goods, Milk Van Run, Pull Procurement, Material Flow,

  • Improvement in House Keeping >25% (Based on 5S audit score) – Typical 5S, Machine 5S (Autonomous Maintenance), 3D Concepts, Visual management

  • Capacity/Sales improvements >50%, QCO/SMED & Machine 5S, Standardization,

  • Space Released >20%, - Re-layouts, 5S, Kanban etc.

  • Reduction in the distance moved for material up to 80% - Relocation of facilities across departments and joining by cell & Kanban (CONWIP)

  • Waste Reduction – Value Stream Mapping & design,

  • Inventory Control – Kanban & Pull Procurement

Among the many benefits which Lean offers few key measurable parameters which keep improving as the Lean Implementation progresses are:

  1. Following usually will show increases

    • Productivity         - man, material money

    • Quality                - of product, first time pass, receipts at customer end

    • On-Time-Delivery

  2. Simultaneous to the above following will reduce

    • Total Overall Cost - manufacturing cost, material cost, cost of quality, marketing cost etc.

    • Inventory            - Raw Material, Work-in-progress, Finished Goods, Consumables, Stationary etc.

    • Throughput Time  - This is the total conversion time of material in the shop floor.  It is also called Manufacturing Lead Time (MLT),

    • Factory Space      - Usually the usable space becomes available as the layouts are changed and work-in-progress is reduced.

Following* is a typical graphical representation of what may happen to measurement matrices after Phase I & Phase II of Lean Implementation.  There may be many more ways to represent this measurement matrices.



     Click on Picture to view in large size

* These are typical results possible to achieve through Lean Implementation.  Actual results may be at variance from organization to organization.

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