Kaizen Training

Lean consulting involves the use of tools, techniques and principles to prevent waste, improve customer value, reduce lead time and enhance quality. In this article, you can find out more about the tools that lean consultants would use to help increase the overall efficiency of a company.

First, let’s take a brief look at lean manufacturing origins and its benefits.

Lean manufacturing is the elimination of waste from manufacturing processes. Toyota developed lean concepts many years ago to address and eliminate problems on their assembly line. Through lean manufacturing, an organization can improve its productivity level by producing more goods or services using fewer resources. This increased productivity is very important for companies to remain competitive in a global market that is highly competitive.

Many organizations or companies have discovered the benefits of lean manufacturing, as it helps to eliminate non-value adding task to increase efficiency. Even though Toyota had introduced the lean concepts, the management approaches and principles are relevant to manufacturing companies and service organizations. Basically, the real difference is in the tools and techniques used to analyze and improve business processes.

 

Some Of Tools And Techniques Used In Lean Consulting

Kaizen activities: Based on the principles used to identify and prioritize ideas for continuous improvement to ensure that the company is moving steadily towards the future.

The 5 S’s (set in order, sort, standardize, shine and sustain): Lean practitioners used this to encourage the efficient use of workspace and materials.

Inventory reduction: This is used to free up the workspace and reduce expenses for value-added activities.

Poka Yoke: Also called mistake proofing, this methodology is used to eliminate any opportunity for mistakes or errors.

Total Preventative Maintenance (TPM): Lean consulting uses TPM principles to predict maintenance activities and help to schedule those activities for times which are more convenient for the manufacturing areas.

Kanban or The pull concept: This is the methodology for delivering subassemblies or raw materials to a work area as it’s used up.

Cycle time reduction: A technique used to improve efficiency by getting the same task done much faster than the baseline measurement.

Just-in-time: A technique which encourages suppliers to send materials to the organization or manufacturing plant just-in-time to use in the production process in order to minimize inventory or storage.

Takt time: This is used to match customer demand to the rate of production. A company can use Takt time to produce materials or goods at the same rate as the sales, which helps to remove finished inventory from stock.

Many companies are turning towards lean consulting today, because lean is been used widely in manufacturing industries, hospitals, travel, logistics as well as government and financial services. In a nutshell, lean will be the ideal solution if you want to significantly increase efficiency and improve your company’s bottom-line.