Lean Manufacturing

With its roots dating as far back as 1930, Lean Manufacturing is at the core of the "Lean" philosophies that have emerged over the past 2 decades (Agile Methodologies, Lean Startup).

Lean Manufacturing was largely developed as part of the Toyota Production System (TPS) as a management philosophy and a set of principles that consider any work not generating value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus up for elimination.

There are FIVE overriding principles to Lean.

1. Identify Customers and Specify Value - The starting point is to recognize that only a small fraction of the total time and effort in any organization actually adds value for the end customer. By clearly defining Value for a specific product or service from the end customer’s perspective, all the non value activities - or waste - can be targeted for removal.
2. Identify and Map the Value Stream – The Value Stream is the entire set of activities across all parts of the organization involved in jointly delivering the product or service. This represents the end-to-end process that delivers the value to the customer. Once you understand what your customer wants the next step is to identify how you are delivering (or not) that to them.
3. Create Flow by Eliminating Waste – Typically when you first map the Value Stream you will find that only 5% of activities add value, this can rise to 45% in a service environment. Eliminating this waste ensures that your product or service “flows” to the customer without any interruption, detour or waiting.
4. Respond to Customer Pull – This is about understanding the customer demand on your service and then creating your process to respond to this. Such that you produce only what the customer wants when the customer wants it.
5. Pursue Perfection - Creating flow and pull starts with radically reorganizing individual process steps, but the gains become truly significant as all the steps link together. As this happens more and more layers of waste become visible and the process continues towards the theoretical end point of perfection, where every asset and every action adds value for the end customer.

Whether you're a manufacturing company, software development company or startup the principals around "Lean Thinking" are relevant.  How is this relevant to your organization? We'd love to discuss it further!