Lean Manufacturing Tools [Definitive Guide]

Lean Manufacturing Tools are powerful tools for improving productivity in Manufacturing Processes (actually for many other business areas too).  Lean Tools operate by eliminating waste.  Many a Manufacturing Company has benefited from adopting Lean Manufacturing Principles.

We’ve created a series of articles that taken together provide a Free Lean Manufacturing Mini-Course to teach you these Lean Manufacturing Tools, what they can do for you, and how to go about implementing them.

Table of Contents

What is Lean Manufacturing?

An overview of what Lean Manufacturing is and what are its key guiding principles.  It’s a quick intro to Lean Manufacturing Practices.

Kaizen: Continuous Improvement the Lean Way

Kaizen is about enrolling everyone from CEO on down to the cleaning staff in continuously making small incremental improvements. It is Lean Manufacturing’s approach to Continuous Improvement.  It is based on the idea that many small improvements can lead to a big process improvement.

Standard Work and Takt Time

Standard Work, Standardized Work, and Standardized Work Instructions all refer to Lean Manufacturing’s approach to documenting and following Best Practices which are subject to continuous improvement as new ways to eliminate waste are discovered.  Part of the process is to collect data that can be used in future analysis aimed at continuous improvement.

SMED: Lean Manufacturing’s Approach to Setup

The SMED Lean Manufacturing Tool is all about tooling up to be able to change jobs quickly–essential for any modern Job Shop.  It means being able to change an entire production process as quickly as possible to produce a different result.

Lean Manufacturing for Job Shops

Turns out that Lean Manufacturing can be very helpful for High Mix Low Volume Job Shops.  Successfully implementing Lean Culture in a Job Shop can really help profitability and overall success.

Visual Factory

Reducing communication waste the lean way.

Cellular Manufacturing

This Lean Tool groups facilities by similar part families to save the lean way.

Poka-Yoke

Mistake Proofing.  What if you eliminate all the ways that a mistake is even possible to make?  This is the power of eliminating human error.

I can already see from preliminary results of our Manufacturing Competitiveness Survey that there’s a lot of interest in Lean Manufacturing, so I thought I’d put together a multi-part series that introduces the guiding principles of Lean Manufacturing.  This is your Home Page for Lean Manufacturing Tools.

What is Lean Manufacturing?

Before we can get started, we need a good definition of, “What is Lean Manufacturing?”

If you search for it, Google has choosen a definition from the EPA as the best:

Lean manufacturing is a business model and collection of tactical methods that emphasize eliminating non-value added activities (waste) while delivering quality products on time at least cost with greater efficiency.

Wikipedia offers the following:

The emphasis on minimizing waste by getting rid of activities that don’t directly generate value for the customer is common to most definitions of Lean Manufacturing.  While it is often thought of in terms of eliminating waste, once an organization is up to speed with Lean Tools the Lean mentality becomes focused on preventing waste before it can ever take root.

Most Lean Manufacturing initiatives focus on eliminating as much as possible these seven wastes in manufacturing:

1.  Over Production:  The whole “Just-in-Time” inventory initiative is largely about reducing overproduction.  Parts sitting in inventory are not adding much value to the customer.  There is some value in being able to take a part out of inventory and get it quickly, but having more parts than are needed to satisfy that goal is overproduction.  When you overproduce, you have parts in inventory that are vulnerable to obsolescence and may be scrapped at a later date when they’re superseded.

2.  Waste of Motion:  Lean strives to reduce motion in the workplace as much as possible so as to eliminate wasted motion.

3.  Excess Inventory:  Inventory comes in a lot of forms, many of which are not finished goods, hence this is a different category than Overproduction.  For example, sub-assemblies, raw components, office supplies, and raw materials are all forms of inventory.  Excess inventory sits on the shelf waiting to create value.  The goal of Lean Manufacturing is to only have enough inventory to create value as and when it is needed.  Another form of Excess Inventory is Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul.  Lean’s approach to minimizing MRO is preventative maintenance so that machines are more reliable and you need fewer spares laying around.

4.  Production of Defects:  It sounds odd to think of “Production” of Defects, but the term emphasizes avoiding the Production of Defects.  Lean Manufacturing wants to eliminate them before they can happen, in other words.  When defects happen, we’re faced with rework, scrap, or salvage, all of which are inherently wasteful activities.  Fewer defects up from means less waste.  None of that even considers the cost in customer terms when customers are exposed to defective product, so this is an important source of waste to eliminate for many reasons.

5.  Waste of Waiting:  Doesn’t it feel wasteful whenever you’re waiting for someone else before you can do your work?  The Waste of Waiting can come about for many reasons including parts shortages, machine downtime, and in-process waiting, where the flow between different process steps is “lumpy” and involves too much waiting.  Lean Manufacturing has several tools to reduce this waste including Standardized Material Handling and Kanban Systems for Parts Shortages and Preventative Maintenance for Machine Downtime.  In-process waiting can be a little trickier.  It’s still a waste of waiting whether the operator is waiting for the machine or the machine is waiting for the operator.

6.  Waste of Transportation:  Whether we’re talking about moving work in progress around the Plant Floor or sub-assemblies and parts through the overall Supply Chain, there is Waste of Transportation that could be minimized.  It can be minimized by organizing to minimize unnecessary Waste of Transportation.  It can be minimized through your material handling and Supply Chain practices.

7.  Waste of Overprocessing:  In this category, the lean thinking focuses on eliminating any processing that does not add value to the customer.  For example, trimming plastic parts that will not be visible can be eliminated.  Deburring parts when the deburring doesn’t add any value is another example.  Often, Waste of Overprocessing can be reduce by finding better methods.  Such methods can ideally eliminate a separate step, but they may also simply reduce the costs by allowing a cheaper machine or tooling to do the work.

Some authorities add two more types of waste that can lead to productivity loss:

8.  Waste of Product: This is the waste of producing a product that doesn’t meet the customer’s demand or specifications.

9.  Waste of Skills/Workforce:  This is the waste of under utilizing the available skills of the workers.

The goal of many Lean Tools is eliminating waste from manufacturing processes to improve performance.

History of Lean Manufacturing Tools

While Lean Manufacturing continues to evolve new methods and ideas, its history can be traced back to pioneering work done at Toyota that resulted in what was called the “Toyota Production System.”   The TPS was developed by Toyota executive Taiichi Ohno during the post-Second World War reconstruction period in Japan.  It was popularized in the West by the 1996 book Lean Thinking by Womack and Jones.  The Japanese roots at Toyota account for so many Japanese words being used to describe Lean Tools and Principles.

Related Areas

There are a number of areas that are not part of Lean Manufacturing per se, but that overlap it and are compatible with it.  For example, Six Sigma and ISO 9000 are both focused on improving quality control, which is certainly something near and dear to the hearts of Lean Manufacturing advocates.

List of Lean Manufacturing Tools

There are a number of Lean Manufacturing Tools, and the remaining installments of our multi-part series on Lean will focus on these various tools or methodologies:

–  5S:  5S is all about organizing the work area to prevent waste.  It is the most commonly implemented Lean Methodology according to many sources and a great way to get started walking the Lean path.

–  Kaizen:  Kaizen is the practice of continually soliciting everyone to proactively work together to achieve Continuous Improvement.  Regular incremental improvement to processes over the long term can achieve some amazing results.  Kaizen force a more egalitarian way of thinking about improvement and includes “Gemba“, which is the practice of leaving the practice to get down onto the Shop Floor and see first hand what’s happening there, and thereby how to perform Continuous Improvement.  The definition of kaizen comes from the Japanese word: ‘kai’ meaning ‘change’ and ‘zen’ meaning ‘good’.

–  Value Stream Mapping: A tool related to Kaizen that is used to identify and analyze waste.  At Toyota, it was known as “Material and Information Flow Mapping,” but Value Stream Mapping is more widely used today.

–  Standardized Work and Takt Time:  Standardized Work (also called Standardized Work Instructions) is just another way of saying documenting and following Best Practices.  Takt Time means pacing production to meet Customer Needs.

–  Single Minute Exchange of Die:  SMED is concerned with being able to rapidly re-purpose a machine or line for another task.  It applies not just to Die-related operations, but really to any machine or line.  Some authorities simply use the “SMED” acronym but refer to it as “Setup Reduction.”

–  Kanban:  Kanban is a system of regulating the flow of goods in what is called a “Pull System”.  As we shall see, Kanban card systems can be used to regulate a variety of processes to make them more efficient.  Pull systems are a way to realize the Just in Time ideal.

–  Poka-Yoke:  Poka-Yoke is “Error Proofing” (what we often call “Idiot Proofing”, but less pejorative).  Poka-Yoke is preventative in nature because it prevents errors from happening in the first place rather than finding and correcting them via inspection.  We want to reach the ideal of Zero Defects wherever possible to eliminate the waste associated with defects and errors.

–  Visual Factory:  Making the state of manufacturing processes easily accessible and very clear to everyone to improve the communication of information.

Practicing these lean principles means you are “lean thinking”.  There are many other Lean Manufacturing Tools, but these are the ones we’ll drill down on in more detail for this article series.  As each new article becomes available, we’ll add a link to the list above as well as link the articles together in order at the bottom of each article.  And over time, we will practice our own Continuous Improvement to make the article series better and better.

The next article in our Lean Manufacturing Tools Series is “5S:  Organize for Productivity.  Lean Manufacturing Part 2”

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