How far are we from lean manufacturing

How far are we from lean manufacturing

I wonder if you find that the one-stop service provided by the administrative service center has indeed improved the efficiency and saved us the trouble of often going to different departments to seal and approve. The administrative service center is like a production unit, in which the work windows of various departments are like production equipment arranged in a streamlined manner, and the matters that need to be handled flow in accordance with the production process. This is an example of lean thinking in life

first, what is lean thinking

any enterprise follows such a formula: price cost = profit. If the cost is high, the profit will be less. Enterprises that lack cash flow may be killed at any time. Why are you short of money? Because less money comes in, more money is spent, and because the money in hand has become dead money, there is no appreciation in the flow, and the result can only be less and less. To get rid of difficulties and make continuous profits, operators must find ways to increase revenue and reduce expenditure, with the help of lean ideas and tools, through internal potential tapping and transformation, optimize logistics, and improve the efficiency and income of operation

in short, lean thinking is to eliminate all waste, obtain the maximum output with the minimum input, and make the fastest response to market demand with the best quality and lowest cost products. The core of lean thinking is to help enterprises achieve on-demand production, lean manufacturing and flexible response, which is also the highest realm of enterprise management. It is precisely because the market economy has changed from a seller's market to a buyer's market, and consumer demand presents the main characteristics of multi variety, small batch and fast delivery, "lean" has become an inevitable choice for more and more enterprises, forming a set of unique production and management system. People all know that mass production can reduce the unit cost of products. In fact, mass production process has caused a lot of waste. If the inventory cost, the risk of overdue scrap, market risk and so on are added together, the total cost is not necessarily the lowest. The most powerful weapon for Dell to challenge IBM is lean production and zero inventory. Toyota has become the most profitable auto company in the world by using small, cheap and fuel-efficient Toyota cars to beat the big and heavy American cars through lean production. Nowadays, lean thinking has gradually penetrated into all industries outside the manufacturing industry, and is changing people's work style and quality of life

second, the working method of lean thinking

1. Determine value

all human economic activities are guided by "interests", which is "value". Any work that cannot add value is a cost and a waste, which is ultimately reflected in the price paid by the customer. Of course, the customer hopes that the less the waste, the better. Therefore, to judge whether a work has "value" is not the decision of the producer the final say, but the decision of the buyer the final say. If the customer says it has value, it has value. However, in life, what customers want and what sellers give often don't match. For example, people want to get to the destination safely at a reasonable price, the fastest speed, and passenger transport companies usually have to wait for a full car for "economy", and some don't take the expressway to save road fees, which delays a lot of passengers' time. Lean thinking embodies the customer-centered values and market driven concepts. Our enterprises, by extension, all product and service providers, should put meeting customer needs first, especially those who are far away from the market (such as R & D personnel) should stand on the position of customers, rethink and determine value

2. Identify the value stream

this step is to see what is valuable and what is worthless in the whole process of providing products or services. Waste without value is everywhere, but we often turn a blind eye to it. It only takes three minutes to go to the bank to remit money, but it may take half an hour to queue up; It takes one hour to fly in the air, but it often takes twoorthree hours to spend on security check, waiting and plane delay; It takes an average of 319 days for a can of Coca Cola to extract aluminum from aluminum ore and make an aluminum can. However, the actual time to create value is only 3 days. A lot of time is spent on the storage and transportation of raw materials and semi-finished products. In fact, there is much more waste than we think

Toyota summed up several common wastes in the factory: first, excessive and premature waste; Second, the waste of waiting; Third, the waste of handling; Fourth, excessive waste of processing; Fifth, the waste of inventory backlog; Sixth, the waste of operation action; Seventh, quality defects lead to rework and other waste. Take handling for example, it is an action that does not produce value, resulting in the consumption of equipment, manpower and space. Many people think how to do the following work without handling? Lean thinking believes that if the upstream and downstream equipment are moved together, an intermediate product is immediately moved to the second process for processing, which can eliminate handling waste. The waste of operation actions is very common, such as empty hands, walking, bending, turning, rigid actions, repeating unnecessary actions, etc. according to statistics, half of the operation actions are invalid, which is also caused by the bad habits of employees and lax assessment. Among the above common wastes, some are pure wastes, which are not good for enterprises and customers, such as waiting and handling. Such wastes should be completely eliminated; Others are necessary waste. Although it does not create value for customers, it is now essential for many enterprises, such as testing. Toyota has a famous saying: even a dry towel can be wrung out of the water as long as you use your brain. By finding and eliminating waste, it can bring huge benefits to enterprises

in life, the two eight principle tells us that when we do something, we often do a lot of useless work, which is a waste. The principle of lean production is simplification, which is often the most effective. Learning lean thinking helps us grasp the essence, focus on the core, and achieve our goals in the most direct and simple way. For enterprises, they should be good at subtraction and know how to give up, such as streamlining the organization and redundant staff, simplifying the approval process, cutting off or outsourcing all businesses that cannot contribute to the formation of core competencies, and so on. These are the practical applications of lean thinking. Special attention should be paid to that now the competition between enterprises has evolved into the competition between supply chains, so the identification of value flow should be from the perspective of the whole supply chain rather than a single enterprise to review and eliminate waste, and pursue overall optimization, not just local optimization

3. Flow

once the value is defined, the value flow diagram of a product or service is sorted out, and obvious waste is eliminated, the next step is to make the retained and value creating steps flow. The cardinal does not bark, and the running water does not rot. Traditional production is extensive, and large batch means waiting in line and overstocking of a large number of products in process. Lean production is intensive, and the equipment is arranged according to the product processing order. The production team produces in small batch and flow, eliminating the stagnation, handling, inventory and other waste in the process, making production smooth and flexible, and adapting to the rapidly changing market. In ancient times, Yang Guifei loved to eat litchi. In order to quickly transport Lingnan litchi to Chang'an, the way of fast horse relay was adopted, which was the continuous flow of small batches and the embodiment of lean thinking

in order to eliminate the pause and achieve the "long-term flow" production, we must master the rapid mold change technology to make the operation switching smooth and smooth, and we must carry out balanced production scheduling to avoid uneven busy and busy, full and hungry people and machines. Lean "flow" thinking tells us that many Chinese enterprises' management strategies respond to changes with constancy. However, as enterprises continue to grow and the external environment continues to change, it will certainly go wrong to deal with new problems with the old methods. The enterprise is getting bigger, but the response is getting slower and slower. Therefore, through splitting and simplifying to restore vitality (the ship is small and easy to turn around), we should dismantle all the "walls" that hinder the flow of value, and then tighten the value chain, so that production is close to the market and supply is close to production, eliminating the waste of intermediate transshipment, so that value can flow quickly to customers

4. Pull on demand

let's take a look at cooking. Buy ingredients before cooking. If you buy too much, it will take up money. If you put it for a long time, it will deteriorate again. If you buy too little, you will be afraid that there will be no rice to cook at that time. It's not easy to control how many meals you cook. If you cook too much, you'll be left. If you cook too little, you won't be able to eat enough. It all depends on the prediction and experience of housewives. In fact, predictions are often unreliable. Production is one of the essential equipment in rubber quality inspection MP (3) grinding production is the same. We arrange production plans according to forecasts, either more or less, and it may not be what customers want, causing a lot of waste. The plan can't catch up with the change. In case of sudden change of customer demand or temporary order insertion, the production is often unprepared. Lean production, on the other hand, is driven by demand, providing necessary products only when needed, no more, no less, no sooner or later. Just like the tap water at home, when you need it, turn on the tap and the water will flow from the upstream immediately. You can use it at any time and take as much as you need. There is no need to stock up or wait

we shop in the supermarket. When the goods pass the bar code scanning of the cashier, the system will record the sales, and the supermarket will replenish those sold goods at any time. The downstream process extracts goods from the upstream process like customers, and the upstream process only produces goods in demand like suppliers, whether it is replenishment or production according to orders. In factory production, on-demand pull is to transmit information through Kanban (the carrier of information transmission), and pull production step by step from the last process to the previous process, until the purchasing department. Although many factories have used Kanban, they have not achieved the same benefits as Toyota. The reason is that the rules of Kanban have not been implemented on the site: picking materials according to the extraction Kanban, working according to the production Kanban, neither picking materials nor working without Kanban, Kanban must be together with the physical object (logistics and information flow are not separated), and defective products cannot be handed over to the post process. It needs to be clear that Kanban is just a tool for continuous improvement. The ideal situation of lean production is that the production pace is synchronized with the market demand, and gradually reduced until the Kanban is cancelled, so that there is only one WIP in each process, and the production mode of one flow is truly realized, which flows to customers continuously like tap water from the beginning of feeding

5. Pursuing perfection

lean is a long march and an endless process of improvement. No change, no leap. From mass production to lean production, as enterprises evolve from one stage to another, they will experience some pain, from quantitative change to qualitative change, and finally pupate into butterflies. Change will inevitably encounter resistance. As long as the direction is good, perseverance, and habits become natural, there are always more ways than difficulties

lean thinking believes that as long as the correct method is adopted, the stress at point E is the elastic limit σ e. Continuous improvement costs little or no money. It relies entirely on internal potential tapping and layout transformation to pursue perfection. At the same time, it does not delay production, because the machine can be moved at night or during lunch break. Improvement follows the "PDCA" (plan, implement, check, improve) cycle, starting from the standardized operation on site, to find ways to eliminate waste. In continuous improvement, there are pauses and even setbacks, so lean improvement