Lean Processes - Where to Start?

The elimination of waste is core to anything related to lean as a practice. Hence the name “lean”, as in, “with as little waste and/or excess as possible”.

To that end, one of the core lean manufacturing principles to follow is to make sure that there is as little waste as possible in and created by everything that you do. The more waste you eliminate, the more your business saves with every product it produces and every process carried out.

This includes:

• Having standing inventory (wasting space and resources)
• Making unusable by-products
• Spreading out your workstations too much, increasing the travel time between them
• Production queues backing up due to bottlenecks
• Too many workers being assigned to a limited task
• Lacking process  automation where it can be used

It’s difficult to cover every case possible where waste can be reduced since there are opportunities to do so in pretty much every task undertaken. However, if you document workflows you follow for everything you do it becomes much easier to see where waste is being generated and how to eliminate it.

For example, without managing your business processes you won’t know how tasks are being performed. You might know how they should be carried out, but you won’t know what methods your team uses in practice.

If you don’t know how your tasks are carried out in practice you won’t be able to reduce waste, as you won’t even know what part of your process is causing that waste.

While it’s almost impossible to completely eliminate waste, striving to do so will cause your processes and practices to continually improve and increase your efficiency.

Simply put, if you’re not focused on reducing your waste, you’re not using lean principles.

Reducing waste and continuous improvement go hand-in-hand as lean manufacturing principles. By continuing to improve your business and processes you can reduce waste as much as possible by eliminating whatever bottlenecks threaten to pop up and examining which processes are inefficient.

Beyond that, continuously striving to improve is a strong approach to take with any repeated task since any improvements you make will benefit all future results.

The only way to continuously improve your practices, however, is to document and manage your processes and procedures first. As with reducing waste, this lets you see where the gaps and inefficiencies in your business are, and thus what can be improved easily (or what improvements will have the greatest effect).

Continuous process improvement doesn’t need you to start off with good processes. Starting off with bad processes means that you have more to improve and thus more to gain from continuous improvement.

Instead, focus on making sure that the processes you’ve documented are accurate. There’s no point in documenting an idealised process for how things should be done, because then you have no idea where you currently stand and what improvements can be made.

It’s tough, but bite the bullet and document your processes accurately by talking to the employees involved and finding out what really happens on the front lines.

It’s better to have an accurate process that’s full of holes than an ideal model that doesn’t fit reality. If in doubt about mapping processes accurately use an external independent observer to document who is not familiar or has any bias to people or processes in your organisation.

The concept of having quality built into your manufacturing processes is key to running an efficient, yet successful business. There’s no good in rapidly producing cheap-to-make products if the final results are full of defects and won’t sell, after all.

Quality usually suffers as a result of either bad processes or human error, and so this lean principle is achieved by using two techniques which I’ll cover individually:

• Poka-yoke      (mistake proofing your processes)
• Jidoka      (automatically detecting abnormalities)

Aside from these principles, quality is built into your processes by considering the value and product you’re providing your customers with, then making sure that your efficiency-saving methods don’t impact on the quality related to providing that value.

Poka-Yoke (mistake proofing)

Poka-yoke (a Japanese term roughly “mistake proofing”) is one of the techniques used to build quality into lean processes, be they for manufacturing workflows or otherwise.

The idea is that every process can be engineered to inherently prevent mistakes either through re-engineering tasks to suit a standard format or by including specific measures which make sure that mistakes are caught early and corrected.

Complimenting poka-yoke is jidoka– the principle that most defects can be automatically detected to completely remove human error from the equation.

Rather than making an employee check every product for defects or errors (such as a thread breaking on a loom), a machine is set up with checks built in to do the task automatically. When an error is detected, an alarm sounds to let the employees at hand know that something has gone wrong.

This human element is also why jidoka is known as “automation with a human touch”.

To round things off, it’s worth taking a moment to look over the lean manufacturing cycle, as this can also provide some useful lean manufacturing principles to follow.

The five steps in the lean manufacturing cycle are:

• Identify value (define what the value to the end customer is)
• Map the value stream (identify all steps in your process and eliminate those that don’t create value)
• Create flow (make the value steps occur in tight sequence to provide as much value to the customer as quickly as possible)
• Establish  pull (make it so that customers are demanding or seeking out the product rather than you having to push it on them)
• Seek perfection (strive for perfection by using continuous improvement, eliminating waste, making reliable processes, and generally following the principles we covered earlier)

While every individual or company embarking on a lean journey will have different challenges based on their particular set of circumstances, there are several crucial steps that can help reduce resistance, spread the right learning, and engender the type of commitment necessary for lean enterprise.

Getting Started

• Find  a change agent, a leader who will take personal responsibility for the lean transformation.
• Get  the lean knowledge, via a sensei or consultant such as PEAQ, who can guide you in lean techniques and how to implement them as part of a system, not  as isolated programs.
• Find a lever by seizing a crisis or by creating one to begin  the transformation. If your company currently isn’t in crisis, focus attention on a lean competitor or find a lean customer or supplier who  will make demands for dramatically better performance.
• Forget  grand strategy for the moment. Evolve this as you get results.
• Map  the value streams, beginning with the current state of how material and information flow now, then drawing a leaner future state of how they should flow and creating an implementation plan with timetable.
• Begin  as soon as possible with an important and visible activity.
• Demand immediate results.
• As soon as you’ve got momentum, expand your scope to link improvements in the value streams and move beyond the shop floor to office  processes. remember lean has to be throughout the organisation to be truly transformation. 
• The journey will take time and having some external help to move forward will maintain momentum, and you will see results quickly, the feedback will encourage and lead to accelerating the process.