Question

What does Lean Manufacturing try to accomplish? How? Why? Where? When? What message don’t we want Lean to represent, Why? Why is visual management so important? Provide 3 examples from your personal experiences and what would occur if they did not exist?

Answer 1

What does Lean Manufacturing try to accomplish?
Lean manufacturing is focused on removing wastes from the process steps that we have in the manufacturing process and improving the process efficiency as a result.

How? Why? Where? When?

How:
* There are basically eight types of wastes that could be present in a system.
* These are defects, overproduction, inventory, waiting time, transportation, motion, extra processing, and unutilized talents.
* The idea is to being capable of observing these wastes in the process and of providing methods for removing/ reducing them.
*Nurturing and training people (for making them capable to 'see' the waste) is more important than anything else in Lean.
Why:
* Lean becomes one of the pillars of the Toyota Production System formulated by Tachii Ohno.
* The lean foundation, along with the others (e.g. Just in time, Jidoka, and People) brings the best quality, high safety, shortest lead time, and lowest cost for an organization.
Where:
* Traditionally, lean philosophy was applied for and to manufacturing settings.
* But there is no reservation that it can be applied to manufacturing.
When:
*The lean philosophy says that if we make minor improvements every day, major improvement will result over time.
* Lean happens best when there is “flow”.

What message don’t we want Lean to represent, Why?

* Lean is definitely not equivalent to cost cutting. It never touches resources or systems where there is no waste.
* It only focuses on the waste reduction. Cost saving is one of the results that can be achieved by Lean.
But the main idea is to keep the 'flow' intact and make the system free from wastes and let it continuously improved.
* Similarly, Lean is not merely about being organized. Being organized is a by‐product of being Lean. Because one can even end up organizing a lot of waste.

Why is visual management so important?

* Visual management or visual control is one of the main pillars of a Lean system which ensures that we achieve continuous improvement in our process.
* The benefits of visual management are lower operational costs, more reliable deliveries, a safer workplace, better equipment availability, empowerment of the team, and better customer outcomes.
* A visual control ensures that there will be fewer mistakes by the personnel involved in the process and as a result, there will be lesser wastage due to overproduction, defects, inventory, motion, and other forms of wastes.
* It reduces the efforts and time (and hence the cost) for educating the employees because the visual appeal does not need any presumption about an employee's educational foundation.
* A strategic visual control applies to all employees who are able to see it.

Provide 3 examples from your personal experiences and what would occur if they did not exist?

1. In our personal vehicles, the dashboard is an example of visual control. If the dashboard were not there, imagine what could happen. For checking the gas/ petrol level, we could have used dipstick method. For detecting any malfunction, we could have ended up a lot of exercises just to identify the location of the problem. These things are made easy by the visual control i.e. the dashboard.

2. In an USB dongle, the light that blinks is a visual control. When there is red light, you know that there is no connection. When the light is green, you know it is EDGE or 2G connection. For a blinking blue, it is 3G or LTE or 4G etc. Without this visual control, we didn't even know whether we have connected to the network, what is the speed, what is the performance of the device etc.

3. There are so many visual controls while traveling on the roads. For example, while traveling on a highway, how could we find the exits if there were no boards showing the position and directions of the exits. We then had to frequently stop the vehicle, ask for help, and find the way. This could have led so mush time and effort wasted.