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.
Cycle Time
The cycle time is the time it takes to complete a task from start to finish or an average of the completion times of a repetitive productive process or task. Cycle times are commonly used to gauge the time it takes to complete tasks along the productive process, although commonly it is measured as the time it takes to manufacture or produce one unit of output at the end of the production line. Depending on the productive process, it may or may not have idle waiting times in between tasks, the sum of the value-adding tasks and idle times is known as the throughput time which in practical situations is used interchangeably with cycle time.
The cycle time for an item or product together with the resources available to produce the item will determine the total capacity of the productive process, and if there is a demand forecast then the capacity utilization of the process can be predicted. In manual labour intensive processes an average is usually used to derive the cycle time for a task, due to the difference in skills and experience of different operators.
Value Stream
The value stream is referred to the series of steps and tasks that add vale to raw materials and work in progress to produce finish goods which the customer is willing to pay for. It is sometimes used interchangeably with supply chain, although the term supply chain in reality incorporates third party stakeholders which in some cases may not form part of the value stream. The value stream is usually the focus of a value stream mapping exercise, where the value stream is mapped out and every single step is identified and labelled as value adding, non value adding or waiting time where materials are stopped and not in motion or being worked on.
The objective of a value stream mapping exercise is to identify the proportion of the total lead time for a good or service that is actually value adding for the customer and how to decrease the amount of time spent on non-value adding activities by re-engineering the productive process and supply chain in order to cut out non value adding and wasteful activities without increasing the number of quality defects.
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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.
MRP - Materials Requirement Planning
An MRP or Materials requirement planning system is a production /purchasing planning system which decomposes finish goods into their different component parts and helps set a schedule as to when these need to be produced or purchased in order to fill a certain customer order of finish goods by a certain date.
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