What is Lean?
Lean Definition | Definition of What is Lean?
Lean manufacturing also known as Lean is a systematic method for the elimination of waste. The core idea is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Simply, lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources.
Goal of Lean
A lean organization understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste.
How to implement Lean?
Nw let us quickly understand how to implement lean. To accomplish this, lean thinking changes the focus of management from optimizing separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments to optimizing the flow of products and services through entire value streams that flow horizontally across technologies, assets, and departments to customers.
Eliminating waste along entire value streams, instead of at isolated points, creates processes that need less human effort, less space, less capital, and less time to make products and services at far less costs and with much fewer defects, compared with traditional business systems. Companies are able to respond to changing customer desires with high variety, high quality, low cost, and with very fast throughput times. Also, information management becomes much simpler and more accurate.
Let’s take an example. An organization that is not practicing Lean will have a process that is extremely complicated. There is a lot of zig-zag movement and this creates lots of losses in the organization. The picture below depicts a process where lean is not implemented.
After Lean is implemented, the processes are streamlined and there is a proper flow that happens from one process to another. Also rather than a push system, the organization starts working on a pull system. The picture below depicts a process where lean has been initiated.
Once we get into advanced level of Lean implementation, each and every process is looked into the value its creating in the value chain. As a result, several processes are either simplified, eliminated or combined. This ensures that each process adds more value to the organization and the losses are reduced / eliminated. The picture below depicts a process where advanced level of lean is implemented.
Lean when combined with the six sigma tools becomes even more powerful. It is recommended that you read what is six sigma. Also the two word famous methodologies of Lean ans Six Sigma re combined, they become much more effective. You can read about Lean Six Sigma here.
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