Lean Manufacturing originally began with the Japanese company, Toyota. The company wanted to be compete with the best companies in the west, even with the limited resources they had. Therefore the company developed what is now known as Lean and this concept focused on eliminating waste from all the processes in the company. In today’s business world, Lean can be described as a philosophy for business success together with a collection of proven tools.
There Are Five Main Principles
that a company adopting Lean manufacturing should understand. These principles include the fact that the company has to specify their value as seen by their customers, identify and create value streams, make these values flow from raw materials to the consumer, use pull production and not push and to always strive for perfection.
The customer is always put first with Lean Manufacturing, which is why a principle of Lean focuses on the company value as perceived by its consumers. Hence the company can place their attention on the features and services the consumer wants, when they want them as well as the price they would like to pay for them.
Just-in-Time (J.I.T) manufacturing can come in since the value needs to flow from the raw materials and through to the consumer; the value stream then needs to produce products at the pull of the consumer-producing what the consumer wants when they require it.
Striving for perfection with Lean processes can be done once the company has the customer defined value flowing at the pull of the customer. Lean manufacturing involves everyone in a company to help meet customer value and values the respect of people. Therefore they will input al their effort into seeing the success of the business leading to more efficient and effective processes.
Following this process will not only bring about waste elimination and reduction, but waste reduction.