Lean Manufacturing

The four goals of Lean manufacturing systems are to:

Improve quality: To stay competitive in today’s marketplace, a company must understand its customers’ wants and needs and design processes to meet their expectations and requirements.
Eliminate waste: Waste is any activity that consumes time, resources, or space but does not add any value to the product or service. There are seven types of waste:
1. Transport (unnecessary movement of materials)
2. Inventory (excess inventory not directly required for current orders)
3. Motion (extra steps taken by employees because of inefficient layout)
4. Waiting (periods of inactivity)
5. Overproduction (occurs when production should have stopped)
6. Over Processing (rework and reprocessing)
7. Defects (do not conform to specifications or expectations)
Reduce time: Reducing the time it takes to finish an activity from start to finish is one of the most effective ways to eliminate waste and lower costs.
Reduce total costs: To minimize cost, a company must produce only to customer demand. Overproduction increases a company’s inventory costs because of storage needs.