Lean Production

From WikiTextbook

1 Lean Production
2 Advantages of Lean Production
3 Disadvantages of Lean Production
4 Requirements of Lean Production
5 Contributors

Lean Production

Lean production is a system that uses minimal resources to produce often high volume of high quality goods with some variety. Cutting down on inventory and work-in-progress to the extreme is an well-known hallmark of leanness. This means that few resources can be used to make products with some different versions of each product for example the basic forms of lego.

Lean production has been developed greatly in practice by Toyota and especially by Taiichi Ohno and is also known as the Toyota Production System. Lean production is based upon Henry Ford's principle of continuous flow (the production line), Frederick Taylor's scientific efficiency studies, W. Edwards Deming's stress on quality and his plea for continuous imrovement (the Deming-cycle also known as plan-do-check-act or "kaizen"), the "pull-system" for production, and just-in-time production. Continuous flow also matters greatly, because it causes the workload to be evened out throughout the process, allowing for better planning and changeovers, and improves quality through better control and maintainance. Standardisation of materials and processses is also recocgnized, already in Henry Ford's days, to be an essential ingredient of lean prodcution.

Toyota differs from " normal" lean production with their insistence on input and participation of all workers in the continuous improvement of the whole process, concensus and respect for all concerned in the production, including third-party suppliers, who must adhere to the lean priciples to be able to supply their client with the rigth quality at the right pace, to avoid inventory build up.

Lean production is nowadays no longer confined to tangible product, but has also entered services (government, healthcare)

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Advantages of Lean Production

Offers much higher customer satisfaction and lower customer prices and therefore more success for the company involved
Creates high levels of productivity, because all processes involved have been and should be continuously analysed, inventory has been reduced to the extreme and results can be achieved quicker
Offers much better quality through simplification of all processes
Requires less stock, because the products are designed with as few materials as possible
Fewer defects which improves quality, because they have more time with fewer materials so the employees can pay more attention to detail
Half engineering hours to develop, because there are less products to use to develop and because it is a simple design faults are less likely to appear

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Disadvantages of Lean Production

Demands a far-reaching change of attitude - a process of normally years - in all tiers of a company to be sustainable
Demands extensive analysis and preparation
Demands a very high degree of standardisation of processes and materials
Relies on high quality stock, because quality is more likely to be noticed because as ideally the process involves much more extensive quality control and just-in-time production, which means that the process can be easily blocked by just one item that is of unsatisfying quality
Relies on exact delivery times and frequencies ("takt") from suppliers, who are therefore generally also required to start producing lean

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