It is, however, important for companies that engage themselves on this journey to prove to themselves that they can achieve results as well. Above and beyond the use of tools and methods for redesigning production lines and supply chains, a great deal of lean implementation is effected through changing ways of thinking, operating, measuring and accounting for performance. This applies to all stakeholders inside and outside the company; owners, management, employees, workers, suppliers and even customers.
Lean is the business model for lean markets characterized by reduced consumption and therefore reduced energy requirements. This is a different growth model than simply a capitalist model based on lean thinking.
In this book the following value chain activities are addressed: production operations and internal logistics, procurement and relations to suppliers, demand and supply based planning and the important issue of cost accounting and value creation in a lean environment.
I had the great fortune and honour to work as a trainer and director of technology in his company in many countries in Europe and also in the USA. Colleagues from that time based their professional future partly on this method Hobbs This method they called Lean Production as opposed to Mass Production. From the system of production management at Toyota known as Toyota Production System, a set of tools was created so that this new concept could be implemented in the USA, from where TPS found its way to Europe Ohno Today it is a choice that has been implemented with recognized success in many industrial and non-industrial sectors.
Although the Japanese never used the term lean production, many tools from their system began to be used in implementations in the West. Many kept the same name as in the language of origin. Terms such as Kanban, Kaizen, 5S, Visual Manage- ment, Gemba, are some of the most known tools used in implementations of lean production. Furthermore, new tools were developed, for example VSM Value Stream Mapping which helped to improve the way of implementing lean practices.
In the meantime, lean production became a subject of study and research at many Universities both in the USA and Europe and there are already an increasing number of scientific and non-scientific publications on the issue. Scientists researching the production sector have started developing complex mathematical approaches for modelling activities that should really be left lean and simple. The term lean production has survived all other potential alternative terms such as Demand Flow Technology or Flow Manufacturing while other terms such as agile or flexible manufacturing were incorporated into the term lean production, and are widely known today.
Studying the literature and various implementations of lean production based on the principles that Womack and his colleagues have developed in the Lean Enter- prise Institute, the use of any implementation methodology is not obvious.
It seems as if the way of implementing lean depends on the choices and the experience of the consultants who undertake to carry out the project. The method of lean flow presented in this treatise incorporates VSM in the method of Constanza in order to cover the complete supply chain. Furthermore, the method has been successfully implemented in office environments as well as in health care organizations such as hospitals, medical centres and pharmacies.
Recently, lean thinking entered the sector of electricity production and distribution, replacing the current paradigm of mass production, which we believe will lead to a truly liberalized electricity supply and not as it is propagated by the European Union, which is the replacement of state monopolies with private monopolies Tsigkas The essential contribution of Constanza was to adapt the production manage- ment methods he learned in Japan to fit Western industrial culture.
He developed a method which is generally valid for almost all production types; it can be individuated for each particular implementation and is totally customer-centric. Adaptation was needed since the Japanese have quite different work environments and working conditions, as well as life beliefs, compared to the Western world. The basic difference lies, in our opinion, in the fact that in the West it is mainly engineers who are responsible for the creation and adding value, while in Japan it is the employees working on the production lines.
This belief is consistent with Aristotle, who, as is known, influenced Western thinking and civilization. Aristotle in Politics, views workers as a species that has value but cannot give value Younkins It is an interesting fact that the philosophy of continuous improvement which constitutes the basis of Japanese lean practice, was introduced by the American statistics specialist Edward Deming in , who went to Japan as a member of a group of American officials providing aid for the reconstruction of the devastated Japanese industry after the second World War.
Deming introduced the philosophy of a practice known as Kaizen, which means improvement or change for the better part of the life philosophy of the Japanese people. The aim of this philosophy is work standardization and its continuous modification in order to improve produc- tivity mainly by means of experiments and the use of statistical methods.
Deming made a wise move in combining the Japanese philosophy of Kaizen with the use of scientific methods in conducting experiments.
The success of such practices is based on learning how to trace and eliminate waste from all activities, not only in the area of production, but throughout the company. Productivity improvement is the responsibility of the workers who make production happen.
This practice targets a more humane approach towards the workers, something which is not a priority in the West. Transposing the practice of continuous improvement Kaizen in the West in parallel with the arrival of lean production which started to happen on a large scale around , did not happen under the same circumstances and conditions comparable to those which were valid in Japan in In Europe, and to a lesser extent in the USA, management was not prepared to assign the responsibility for continuous improvement to the workers directly involved in the production process.
The results of this policy were quickly seen. Although the philosophy of lean production is not very compatible with Western ways of thinking and acting in managing companies, the number of enterprises which have chosen to implement lean techniques in production and the supply chain is increasing sharply, especially in recent years.
Many of these companies implemented lean practices partly and piecewise, mainly for the short term improvement in productivity and efficiency of the employees Tsigkas and Freund What they really did, was to use new methods in an old economy structure. However, the company, now and in the future, will apply lean methods to a new and robust economic era, the era of mass customization, where productivity and effi- ciency need reorientation in the case of the open lean enterprise.
The Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement finds its counterpart in the West in Aristotelian thinking defined in Topica3. According to the philosopher, the means of production are valuable because the final products are useful to people and the more useful and desired a good, the higher the value of the means of production. Therefore in the open lean enterprise, the process of continuous improve- ment is based on sustainable interaction with the prosumer through a continuously upgraded process.
The purpose is the steady increase in the value of two-way communication. The value of the means of production and not the cost of production is the significant parameter. Productivity and efficiency are replaced by the usefulness of the services offered to the prosumer.
This axiom sets the basis for extroversion in enterprises and introduces an extroverted way in managing companies as well as a new economic model of value coined here as value socionomics, taking at the same time distance from the introversion the opposite of extroversion that imposes and sustains the importance of conventional cost of production. Displacement of a conventional enterprise to a lean topos begins in production. The reason is simple: production is the closest point to the customer.
The method is applied initially to production through the development of activities that add value and the simultaneous reduction in waste until its elimination. The result is the achievement of synchronized mixed model flow lines as well as mixed model flow cells for machine environments leading to a new factory layout based on the implementation of lean flow.
Once lean flow is put in operation in production, implementation of the method continues in the support departments of production, mainly in marketing and in purchasing. The aim is to put all the supply chain under lean flow.
The department of product development follows in order to support the mixed model in production. In a lean flow environment, the enterprise must change the method in accounting for the cost of production.
The main reason that leads to this change is the different way of thinking and practice in the factory. For example, abandoning production in lots or batches and moving to one-piece-flow, the con- ventional method of cost accounting is found to be misplaced. JAndres October 2, at PM. Newer Post Older Post Home. Subscribe to: Post Comments Atom. About Our Events.
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