What is Lean Manufacturing?

Lean manufacturing is a production process based on an ideology of maximising

productivity while simultaneously minimising waste within a manufacturing
operation. The lean principle sees waste is anything that doesn’t add value that
the customers are willing to pay for.

The benefits of lean manufacturing include reduced lead times and operating
costs and improved product quality.

Also known as lean production, the methodology is based on a specific manufacturing

principles that have influenced production systems across the world as well as those of
other industries including healthcare, software and various service industries.

How Does Lean Manufacturing Work?

The core principle in implementing lean manufacturing is to eliminate waste to
continually improve a process. By reducing waste to deliver process improvements,
lean manufacturing sustainably delivers value to the customer.

The types of waste include processes, activities, products or services that require time,
money or skills but do not create value for the customer. These can cover underused
talent, excess inventories or ineffective or wasteful processes and procedures.

Removing these inefficiencies should streamline services, reduce costs and ultimately
provide savings for a specific product or service through the supply chain to the
customer.

Why is Lean Manufacturing Important and How Can it

Help?
Waste in industry, whether that is idle workers, poor processes or unused materials are
a drain on productivity, and lean manufacturing aims to eliminate these. The motives
behind this vary depending on opinion, from increasing profits to providing benefits to
customers. However, whatever the over-arching motives, there are four key benefits to
lean manufacture:

• Eliminate Waste: Waste is a negative factor for cost, deadlines and resources. It
provides no value to products or services
• Improve Quality: Improved quality allows companies to stay competitive and
meet the changing needs and wants of customers. Designing processes to meet
these expectations and desires keep you ahead of the competition, keeping
quality improvement at the forefront
 • Reducing Costs: Overproduction or having more materials than is required
creates storage costs, which can be reduced through better processes and
materials management
• Reducing Time: Wasting time with inefficient working practices is a waste of
money too, while more efficient practices create shorter lead times and allow for
goods and services to be delivered faster

What is the Meaning of Lean Manufacturing?

Lean manufacturing entails streamlining processes and procedures to eliminate waste
and thereby maximise productivity. Womack and Jones (see above) defined lean as, “a
way to do more and more with less and less - less human effort, less equipment, less
time, and less space - while coming closer and closer to providing customers exactly
what they want."

The basis of lean is often translated into five core principles.

What are the 5 Principles?

The five core principles of lean manufacturing are defined as value, the value stream,
flow, pull and perfection. These are now used as the basis to implement lean.

1. Value: Value is determined from the perspective of the customer and relates to how
much they are willing to pay for products or services. This value is then created by the
manufacturer or service provider who should seek to eliminate waste and costs to meet
the optimal price for the customer while also maximising profits.

2. Map the Value Stream: This principle involves analysing the materials and other
resources required to produce a product or service with the aim of identifying waste and
improvements. The value stream covers the entire lifecycle of a product, from raw
materials to disposal. Each stage of the production cycle needs to be examined for
waste and anything that doesn’t add value should be removed. Chain alignment is often
recommended as a means to achieve this step.

Modern manufacturing streams are often complex, requiring the combined efforts of
engineers, scientists, designers and more, with the actual manufacturing of a physical
product being just one part of a wider stream of work.

3. Create Flow: Creating flow is about removing functional barriers to improve lead
times. This ensures that processes flow smoothly and can be undertaken with minimal
delay or other waste. Interrupted and disharmonious production processes incur costs
and creating flow means ensuring a constant stream for the production or service
delivery.
4. Establish a Pull System: A pull system works by only commencing work when there
is demand. This is the opposite of push systems, which are used in manufacturing
resource planning (MRP) systems. Push systems determine inventories in advance with
production set to meet these sales or production forecasts. However, due to the
inaccuracy of many forecasts, this can result in either too much or not enough of a
product being produced to meet demand. This can lead to additional warehousing
costs, disrupted schedules or poor customer satisfaction. A pull system only acts when
there is demand and relies on flexibility, communication and efficient processes to be
successfully achieved.

The pull system can involve teams only moving onto new tasks as the previous steps
have been completed, allowing the team to adapt to challenges as they arise in the
knowledge that the prior work is mostly still applicable to delivering the product or
service.

5. Perfection: The pursuit of perfection via continued process improvements is also

known as ‘Kaizen’ as created by Toyota Motor Corporation founder Kiichiro Toyoda
(see ‘When and Who Invented Lean Manufacturing?’ above). Lean manufacturing
requires ongoing assessment and improvement of processes and procedures to
continually eliminate waste in an effort to find the perfect system for the value stream.
To make a meaningful and lasting difference, the notion of continuous improvement
should be integrated through the culture of an organisation and requires the
measurement of metrics such as lead-times, production cycles, throughput and
cumulative flow.

It is important for the culture of continuous improvement to filter through all levels of an
organisation, from team members and project managers right up to the executive level,
to create a collective responsibility for improvement and value creation.

The 8 Wastes of Lean Manufacturing

The Toyota Production System originally detailed seven wastes that don’t provide value
to the customer. These wastes were:

• Unnecessary transportation
• Excess inventory
• Unnecessary movement of people, equipment or machinery
• Waiting – either people or idle equipment
• Over-production of a product
• Over processing or adding unnecessary features to a product
• Defects that require costly correction

An eighth waste has since been highlighted by many lean practitioners:

• Unused talent and ingenuity

These types of waste can be broadly split into three specific types:

1. Mura: Unevenness or waste as a result of fluctuating demand, whether from customer

requests or new services (and thereby additional work) being added by an organisation.
2. Muri: Overburden or waste due to trying to do too much. This relates to resource
allocation and involves people being asked to do too much. Time can be wasted as
people switch tasks or even lose motivation due to being overburdened.
3. Muda: This is process-related waste and work that adds no value. If an activity doesn’t
add value, or directly support one that adds value, then it is unnecessary and should be
eliminated.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Lean manufacturing carries several advantages and disadvantages depending on how
and where it is implemented.

Advantages:

1. Saves Time and Money

Cost-saving is the most obvious advantage of lean manufacture. More efficient

workflows, resource allocation, production and storage can benefit businesses
regardless of size or output. Time saving allows for reduced lead times and better
service in providing products quickly to customers, but can also help save money
through allowing for a more streamlined workforce.

2. Environmentally Friendly

Reducing waste in time and resources and removing unnecessary processes can save
the costs in energy and fuel use. This has an obvious environmental benefit, as does
the use of more energy efficient equipment, which can also offer cost savings.

3. Improved Customer Satisfaction

Improving the delivery of a product or service, at the right cost, to a customer improves
customer satisfaction. This is essential to business success as happy customers are
more likely to return or recommend your product or service to others.

Disadvantages:

1. Employee Safety and Wellbeing

Critics of lean argue that it can ignore employee safety and wellbeing. By focussing on
removing waste and streamlining procedures it is possible to overlook the stresses
placed on employees who are given little margin for error in the workplace. Lean has
been compared to 19th Century scientific management techniques that were fought
against by labour reforms and believed obsolete by the 1930s.
2. Hinders Future Development

Lean manufacturing’s inherent focus on cutting waste can lead management to cut
areas of a company that are not deemed essential to current strategy. However, these
may be important to a company’s legacy and future development. Lean can create an
over-focus on the present and disregard the future.

3. Difficult to Standardise

Some critics point out that lean manufacturing is a culture rather than a set method,
meaning that it is impossible to create a standard lean production model. This can
create a perception that lean is a loose and vague technique rather than a robust one.

What is an Example of Lean Manufacturing?

Lean manufacturing is used across industry for a variety of production processes,
although notably, it was first seen within the automotive industry.

Creating efficient workflows and processes is important to maximising output on a

production line, which in itself harks back to Adam Smith’s 1776 ‘Division of Labour,’
where he noted how the efficiency of production was vastly improved if workers were
split up and given different roles in the making of pins. This was because workers could
be tasked with work that suited their skills or temperament, there was no need to move
them from their stations or for them to learn different skills or swap tools.

Lean manufacturing has drawn on these ideas and extended them to include removing
waste from multiple processes and procedures. Lean methods can also be seen outside
of production with the provision of services too.

How Can Lean Manufacturing be Implemented?

The general meaning of lean is to identify and eliminate waste, from which quality and
production times can be improved and costs reduced. This is one method of
approaching lean manufacturing, but it can also be approached using the ‘Toyota Way,’
which is to focus on improving workflows rather than waste.

Both methods have the same goals, but with the Toyota Way the waste is eliminated
naturally rather than being sought out as the focus. Followers of this method of
implementation say it is a system-wide perspective that can benefit an entire business
rather than just removing particular wastes. The Toyota Way seeks to simplify the
operational structure of an organisation in order to be able to understand and manage
the work environment. This method also uses mentoring known as ‘Senpai and Kohai’
(Senior and Junior) to help foster lean thinking right through an organisational structure.
However, despite the different approaches both methods share a number of principles,
including:

• Automation
• Continuous Improvement
• Flexibility
• Load Levelling
• Perfect First-Time Production or Service Quality
• Production Flow and Visual Control
• Pull Processing
• Supplier Relationships
• Waste Removal

Tips to Implement Lean Processes

As they introduced the concepts of lean manufacturing in their writing, Womack and
Jones also explained why some lean organisations succeeded while others failed. The
main difference was that those who failed copied specific practices while the successful
organisations sought to understand the underlying principles required to make the
whole lean system work.

Becoming lean is a continuous process of change that need to be assessed and

monitored. It will require frequent changes and adjustments in your working practices to
maintain.

Creating a lean toolbox of methods can help simplify your lean management systems,
but you should remember that lean is more of a philosophy than a standardised set of
procedures.

Despite this, there are four steps that you can take to help create your own lean project
management system:

1. Design a Simple Manufacturing System

The more you break down your systems into their simple, composite parts, the easier
each will be to monitor and improve through eliminating waste.

2. Keep Searching for Ways to Improve

Staff at all levels should be encouraged and supported in finding ways to improve
processes and procedures. It is important to have an honest overview of procedures in
order to find areas for improvement. The more specific these improvements are to your
particular company and processes, the more effective they will be.
3. Continuously Implement Design Improvements

It is not enough to seek out improvements. These need to be implemented through your
designs, procedures and processes. It is not enough to just seek improvements, they
need to be put into practice on a practical level too. Any improvements should also be
backed up by improvement metrics and it is often best to make small incremental
changes rather than large sweeping ones.

4. Seek Staff Buy-In

In order to effectively achieve the first three steps you need to gain the support of your
staff. The whole methodology can suffer if management decides to implement it without
gaining the buy-in of employees. Since waste, and therefore lean, is an overall concept
across the entire business, it requires management to identify and understand the true
problems that need to be solved.

Employees can block the success of lean management by pushing back, especially if
the burden of managing and implementing lean is placed upon their shoulders. A good
solution to this is to create a ‘lean plan’ where teams can provide feedback and
suggestions to management, who then make the final decision on any changes.
Coaching is also important to explain concepts and impart knowledge to employees at
all levels.

Lean Manufacturing Tools Used

There are a variety of tools that can be used to help implement a lean management
system, these include:

• Control Charts – to check workflows

• Kanban Boards – to visualise the workflows
• 5S – a methodology for organising the workplace
• Multi-Process Handling
• Error Proofing (also known as ‘Poka-Yoke’)
• Rank Order Clustering – to aid production flow analysis
• Single-Point Scheduling
• Single-Minute Exchange of Die (SMED) – a fast method to move between
manufacturing processes
• Total Productive Maintenance – to improve manufacturing integrity and quality
• Value Stream Mapping
• Work Cell Redesign

Lean vs Six Sigma

Six Sigma is a method of data-driven management that is similar to lean in that it also
seeks to assess and eliminate process defects to improve quality. However, while both
processes seek to eliminate waste, they use different approaches to do so.
While lean contends that waste is a product of additional steps, processes and features
that a customer doesn’t believe add value, Six Sigma sees waste as a product of
process variation.

Despite the differences, Six Sigma and lean can be combined to create a data-driven
approach called ‘Lean Six Sigma.’

Conclusion
Lean manufacturing is a methodology that can help streamline and improve
manufacturing processes or other services in order to provide enhanced benefits for
customers, while saving time and money through the elimination of waste.

As a methodology, lean is best applied across the entirety of an organisation with

continual monitoring and improvements being applied with the support of employees at
all levels.

TWI can help with a number of product and process development support activities,
including technical support, manufacturing and production support, technology
acquisition, asset management and failure analysis and repair. You can find out more
about all of these services and support activities here.