Lean Concepts
Lean Concepts
Lean Concepts
Lean Manufacturing Terms and Concepts
leanmanufacture.net is a web resource and blog style website where you can find out more about lean manufacturing, operations management and business strategy from concepts and theory to real life applications which will help you achieve your operations goals and objectives. The site is intended to be user friendly and a vast knowledge resource that explains and addresses fundamental issues to the success of any business to anyone from students to entrepreneurs, manufacturing engineers, managers consultants and anyone interested in this broad subject. I hope you enjoy the site.
A Kaizen board is a communication tool which serves as a communication medium between the lean team, process engineers and all stakeholders in the production process or business regarding the application of problem solving , potential problems and lean manufacturing techniques in Kaizen initiatives. It is a communication medium in both ways as it allows plant workers and process operators to communicate possible causes and solution for issues being addressed as part of the kaizen/continuous improvement process. Usually the Kaizen board will relate to a section of the plant or a specific problem or issues being addressed.
The maintenance or engineering department should not be the only employees that get involved in the maintenance of the plant. Both plant operators and managers should be involved as well in order to gain familiarity with the equipment and be able to troubleshoot problems and perform minor maintenance tasks when the engineering team is not available or working on higher value added tasks. This can easily be achieved by standardizing maintenance tasks, which can be done by operators, and documenting the procedures either through writing standard operating procedures or one point lessons. Production operators should be encouraged to write one point lessons to communicate engineering knowledge to fellow team members.
SMED stands for single minute exchange of Die, which is the reduction of machine set-up time through the use of engineering, technology, simplicity, and standardization.
Quicker changeover times in a production plant or on production equipment can sometimes be easier to achieve in some industries than others. For example in the brick manufacturing industry it can take several hours to perform a product change, due to the nature of the manufacturing process and raw material preparation, but in the injection blow molding of plastic bottles it can sometime be performed within minutes, given highly automated robots and well lay out of the manufacturing equipment.
A supply chain is the set of raw materials, finish goods, and information systems that delivers finished goods in customer’s hands. Sometimes the supply chain is referred to the channel that companies used to reach their consumers or their distribution networks.
Supply chain management is usually an integral part of operations management and when run well as a pull system it can deliver a significant competitive advantage to businesses. It can be aided by an inventory management system.
Subscribe to our Newsletter
We are dedicated to helping people succeed. We feature founder stories, design articles and startup deep dives, hard life experience, advice, and creative thinking
