LEAN and Us
So what is LEAN manufacturing?
Gary Kerr is editor of the "Association for Manufacturing Excellence" newsletter, a source of many Lean Manufacturing Articles for the Australian region. He also regularly facilitates LEAN training at Milspec. Gary says: "I like to draw mental models for myself to help understand concepts. The natural order of things is chaotic. If you leave a horizontal work surface alone for long enough it will start accumulating "Stuff". All shelves will become full of more "Stuff". My mental model of this phenomenon is a large steel wok with a marble rolling around inside. Excellence is represented by the marble staying to the top-most outer limit of the wok. The natural order of things (chaos) is represented by the marble rolling to the centre of the wok. It takes continuous and on-going vigilance and effort to keep the marble at the outer edge. Take away the effort and the marble rolls to the centre. LEAN is counter-intuitive, unnatural and feels wrong (at first) and must be practiced until it becomes more natural. Keep up the effort and don't stop applying energy to keep the marble at the outer of the wok. And finally I did come up with a single sentence to describe all this. Click here to contact Gary Kerr and register for your free copy of the AME Weekly Update Like most manufacturing organizations Milspec Manufacturing has been using batch process methods for most of its history. However, with a change in ownership, David and Wendy Cooper were keen to look at improved efficiencies. Where conventional thinking would dictate that manufacturing efficiencies were achieved by doing one task at a time on a large batch of an individual product, LEAN manufacturing called for as much of the product to be completed as possible before moving on to the next piece. With batch processing you don't start on the next part of the process until the first part has been completed on all parts of the batch. With LEAN manufacturing techniques, products move through the process individually so the first products to be completed are finished and in the customers' hand while many other products are in production. Traditional manufacturing has been built on batch processing, assuming that this where the efficiencies are, but that is not the case at all. It does make sense; Henry Ford manufactured using LEAN principles, and it is only recently that the manufacturing industry has re-visited LEAN. It's about showing people a smarter way of doing things. Milspec had been building target systems for almost 20 years so we had a really good idea of how long each item took to make and thought we wouldn't be able to do it any faster. However, in the first test of LEAN manufacturing principles that we ran, we saved 45 per cent of the standard time to manufacture a target system. Then in the second pass we took a further 40 per cent off the time. Traditional batch processing has a direct effect on cash flow as you have a lot of inventory tied up in the manufacturing process at any one time. Using LEAN principles the time from receipt of an order to delivery is much shorter, which improves cash flow and the enterprise is more efficient. As a measure of Milspec's commitment to LEAN Manufacturing, in December 2009, thirty employees graduated with a Certificate IV in Competitive Manufacturing. Our aim is to become a 'LEAN Organisation'. The second 'class' of CMI participants expects to graduate by the end of November 2011. We are continuing on our Lean journey with senior management involved in regular Leadership team workshops to further enhance Milspec's performance as a Lean organisation.
Flow will start to break down into small elements joined together with inventory. This is the natural order of things.
"Unnatural acts performed by consenting adults in pursuit of business excellence"
Gary Kerr, AME Weekly Updates, lean manufacturing articles.
