What Is Lean?
It is true that Lean production methods were pioneered by Toyota in Japan many years ago, but nowadays the reality is that Lean is a culture relevant to any company or organisation, in any business sector, in any country.
Lean thinking means that you focus on adding value to a process, a product family, to a department, a division – and that you eliminate anything wasteful. And when you apply Lean principles to your operation you can start to identify and remove wasted or unnecessary effort, time, decisions, cost, materials, paperwork, processes.
Lean principles
You could enable your organisation to become streamlined by adopting Lean principles.
The fundamental principles of Lean are easy to understand and remember, if not easy to achieve:
- analyse and specify what does create value from the customer’s perspective
- record all the steps necessary to provide the product or service across the whole value stream to highlight non value adding activities
- make those actions that create value flow without interruption, detours, back tracking, delays or errors
- only complete what is pulled by the customer
- aim for perfection by continually eliminating all forms of waste as it is discovered
Lean techniques
5S
Continuous Improvement
Quicker Changeovers: SMED
Six Sigma
MOST®