Category Archives: Manufacturing

The Lean Guru

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According to a recent article in Industry Week, the basic principles of lean — waste reduction, customer centricity and flow optimization — are fairly simple in theory but when it comes to putting lean principles into practice, even the most well-intentioned manufacturers can run up against some roadblocks. That’s why many manufacturing firms begin their lean journey by seeking the counsel of a consultant … a “lean guru”.

The article makes a great point. A consultant brings more to the table than simply helping organizations conduct kaizen events or create value-stream maps. Hiring a consultant is an excellent way for management and leadership to signal a change within the company and to use the consulting event to define and formulate a revised purpose or a reason for being. This helps you get lean on the fast track, and considering that lean is a great fix for a down economy that can help you sense demand, source successfully, streamline services, and reduce inventory, which reduces waste and lowers cost, how can you go wrong? Especially when Consultants are Cheap.

Manufacturing Supply Chain Challenges and Opportunities

The increased complexity of today’s supply chain brings with it a host of challenges for manufacturers. These include:

  • brand identify protection
    major brands are a bad press — and litigation — magnet if anything goes wrong
  • recall efficiency
    if a health-risk is found, it can be a challenge to recall the product in time
  • counterfeit prevention
    the EU seized six million counterfeit personal care products and one point two million food and beverage products at the border last year and the problems in pharmaceuticals are even worse
  • supply chain disruption bypass
    when a natural disaster, energy crisis, or a political situation arises, a company needs to quickly divert its supply chain around the situation to avoid disruption

However, as pointed out in a recent Industry Week article, “manufacturers are seizing opportunities across the supply chain” by tackling these challenges head-on. Companies that recognize the complexity of the modern supply chain and adopt serialization solutions that enable greater visibility, increased agility, and improved efficiency see the following opportunities:

  • improved responsiveness
    a company with an agile supply chain can quickly respond to changing demand patterns and maintain near-optimal inventory levels
  • consumer demand capitalization
    a company with downstream visibility can gain insights into consumer demand and produce the products customers want before its competition and gain a greater market share
  • SLA enforcement
    traditionally, outsourcing led to reduced visibility … but modern visibility and serialization solutions help manufacturers insure that the third party they outsource to lives up to their performance obligations

Machine-To-Machine Strategies Could Lower Your Production Costs

A recent article in Supply Chain Digest noted that it was Time for Manufacturers to Take Stock of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Strategies. The logic is that M2M — which leverages connectivity to communicate directly with one another — carries the potential to serve as a “game changer” that can dramatically reshape a company and how it goes to market.

Done right, M2M could enable companies and their customers to make faster and better decisions as there would be real time visibility into the status of each machine and production line it is part of. It will allow the development of closed-loop applications and processes where decisions can be transmitted and the results retrieved to verify the implementation of those decisions. It could reduce service costs as real-time monitoring of systems will indicate when preventative maintenance is required and could also reduce fuel expenses associated with fleet management.

It’s certainly something worth looking into if your production costs are high.

Lean Problem Solving: A Great Fix for a Down Economy

As clarified by Jamie Flinchbaugh of the Lean Learning Center in a recent Industry Week article on “problem-solving through the lean lens”, lean is about problem solving. It is the never ending process of solving the problem that prevents us from getting to the ideal state where every need is met on time and with zero waste.

When trying to solve a problem, it’s important to note that waste is caused not just by processes with major problems, but by processes with minor problems as well … and that minor problems add up and multiply the total waste. Sometimes a wasteful process will have a dozen little inefficiencies that multiply into one big efficiency. That’s why a lean approach is needed — it looks for deviations from optimal at every step of a process, no matter how small at each stage of the problem solving process.

Lean attempts to identify the purpose of a process in identifying the root cause of a problem, not just the intended end result. Consider the example of cycle timing marks in the assembly process brought to light in the article. Viewed through a traditional lens, the purpose is to help the operator keep pace and speed up if he falls behind. But viewed through a lean lens, the purpose is to identify a potential problem with the process. Work should keep its own pace and the lines should spot problems as they occur, not (well) after the fact. If a task is problematic, because parts don’t quite fit or machinery isn’t performing at spec, it should be immediately identifiable from the lag in cycle time and provide an immediate opportunity for quick intervention.

Lean also trains us to engage problems, and not assume that they will be addressed by others. Most organizations work in fire-fighting mode and allow a problem to select them, rather than selecting a problem and dealing with it. Other problems, of seemingly lesser importance, are dismissed as insignificant or “typical” and ignored. Resources need to be allocated to a problem as it occurs, not after the fact.

Finally, lean tells us that a solution is not a solution unless it makes the new way easier or the old, problematic, way impossible. Lean doesn’t force-fit a solution — it develops one that fits just right.

For more information on the basic problem solving process (which you should embed a lean lens into), see the following posts:

For more information on lean, see the following posts:

Anti-Trends from the 21st Century Supply Chain

Kinaxis on Response Management, on its 21st Century Supply Chain blog, recently published it’s “anti-trends for the down economy”.

  • Procurement practices will become more adversarial in 2009
    as cash-strapped buyers try to force suppliers to accept longer payment terms (instead of adopting good supply chain finance)
  • Integrated Business Planning will remain a wish
    due to a lack of incentives for Finance and Supply Chain to cross the divide
  • Western brand owners will lose market share
    as Asia emerges from the global slump sooner than the west, Asian contract manufacturers will establish their own brands to beef up production

These are certainly well thought. I urge you to read the original post in full.