Lean manufacturing and elimination of waste - why is it difficult?
Focus of lean manufacturing is to remove waste from the system in every form. Lean has clearly defined wastes and categorized them. But for many lean manufacturers still it is a hard task to find any major waste in the system. Most of the times these organizations identify waste as people who has no work to do, things end in thrash cans etc. while these might be wastes and should be eliminated they surely can’t explain 90% of the wasted resources of any organization. On the other hand even the best lean manufacturer is said to be wasting about 30% of their resources. So even the best lean manufacturer should have more waste than these. So what is the problem? Why there are no wastes?
The real problem is in hiding the waste. If the workers at every level, if they are not educated on the importance of lean manufacturing and if lean is used as a tool of penalizing the people who contribute to waste, then people will take the simpler root. They will simply hide the problem. This will be facilitated with messy workplaces where they will find the room to hide the waste, inefficient pull manufacturing systems etc. There might be principles like visual factory, single piece flow in practice. Although it is true infrastructure and setup will play a part in executing all these plans, if people do not play their part it is useless to have them in place.
People are at the heart of lean manufacturing. They must understand the importance of lean movement. Importantly they must be confident and comfortable in identifying and challenging existing wastes. People at all levels must be educated and empowered to unhide wastes and remove them with help of the others. This is actually the Kaizen at work.
In many organizations people are not comfortable in identifying and challenging existing practices. This is mainly due to the bad management and insufficient knowledge among workers. Remember, if you are not identifying and removing waste continuously from your system you can not be a world class performer, neither can be called as a lean manufacturer. Have a look at your organization. Are your workers comfortable in identifying wastes and challenge them?
The real problem is in hiding the waste. If the workers at every level, if they are not educated on the importance of lean manufacturing and if lean is used as a tool of penalizing the people who contribute to waste, then people will take the simpler root. They will simply hide the problem. This will be facilitated with messy workplaces where they will find the room to hide the waste, inefficient pull manufacturing systems etc. There might be principles like visual factory, single piece flow in practice. Although it is true infrastructure and setup will play a part in executing all these plans, if people do not play their part it is useless to have them in place.
People are at the heart of lean manufacturing. They must understand the importance of lean movement. Importantly they must be confident and comfortable in identifying and challenging existing wastes. People at all levels must be educated and empowered to unhide wastes and remove them with help of the others. This is actually the Kaizen at work.
In many organizations people are not comfortable in identifying and challenging existing practices. This is mainly due to the bad management and insufficient knowledge among workers. Remember, if you are not identifying and removing waste continuously from your system you can not be a world class performer, neither can be called as a lean manufacturer. Have a look at your organization. Are your workers comfortable in identifying wastes and challenge them?
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