About Lean

Lean Manufacturing is the popular term used to describe the philosophy that underpins the Toyota Production System. For over 40 years Toyota has followed a model that has allowed it to become not only the foremost car maker in the world but also a company that provides a world class benchmark for others to judge their own operations against, regardless of their industry type. Although several different versions have been made over the years the elements of the Toyota Production System are generally represented by a ‘house’.

The TPS house consist of multiple elements, overall operational goals of the system; achieving the highest possible quality, with the lowest possible cost, with the shortest lead-time appear at the top of the house The pursuit of profit via cost reduction is also stressed. In essence if you can accomplish all of these goals then your company will satisfy customer and stakeholder needs. Supporting the goals are the two pillars of Just-in-Time and Jidoka. The Just-in-time pillar refers to the more famous and widely known elements of flow, Takt Time and pull production commonly adopted as Lean ‘tools’ when embarking on a Lean implementation.

The second pillar is the one often overlooked in most implementations. Jidoka is a play on a Japanese word and roughly translates as automation, although achieved with a sense of human like intelligence. Running machines continuously is not a specific Toyota Production System requirement, rather it strives for machines that operate with the ability to stop at the first sign of an abnormality. The term also stresses the importance of separating man from machine to enable multi-process handling.

The foundation of the Toyota Production System house can consist of many elements depending on the point of view of the person who created it. Generally it will consist of a mix of elements such as Heijunka, (Level Production), Standardised Work, and Kaizen, (Continuous Improvement). Often included is the element of Stability this is particularly important in machine intensive shops. This reflects the additional emphasis these operations place upon maintaining equipment uptime and process stability to support the rest of the system.

At its heart Lean manufacturing is the relentless effort to remove ‘waste’ from all process activities. Waste, or non-value added work, is defined as any action that does add value to a product in the eyes of the process customer.

These non-value added activities are classified into seven categories:

Lean implementations at any level are characterised by significant early gains particularly in the areas of reduced time to manufacture, dramatically reduced lead times and increased efficiencies throughout the value stream. All of these benefits can be achieved with no significant capital expenditure.

Unfortunately most organisations fail to capitalise on these gains and do not put in place the methodologies that support and lead the changes to ensure they are sustained in the long-term and over a period of a few months, without the drive to constantly solve problems at their root cause, wastes will creep back into the system.