It goes by several names – Lean, Continuous Improvement, Operational Excellence, Process Improvement, Transformation – but the core of this discipline, regardless of nomenclature, is to reduce the amount of time between cash going out the door until you collect cash for a delivered product.  We do this through the elimination or reduction of waste and the optimization of processes, always with the customer in mind.  I’ve spent more than a decade on the floor executing kaizen and rapid improvement events to organization-level strategy alignment and deployment (Hoshin Kanri).  System-level cohesion with organizational alignment and determined execution; everyone rowing the boat to the drum beat of the customer to maximize efficiency. 

In today's competitive business landscape, maintaining consistent quality standards and operational excellence is crucial for long-term success. One effective tool that empowers organizations to achieve these goals is Layered Process Audits (LPAs). LPAs provide a structured approach to monitor and improve processes, offering a range of benefits that enhance efficiency, quality, and customer satisfaction. In this blog, we will explore the advantages of LPAs and how they contribute to business success.

In an earlier blog post, we said that defect prevention depended on understanding the root cause(s). Because this is such an important part of the problem-solving process, let’s explore it further.

Having on-demand labor at your fingertips is a great competitive advantage, but many businesses have questions about how bringing in new operators might affect quality. 

The current lean paradigm is about to drastically change, leading to an expansion of just-in-time. While leveling is a part of any lean production system, we need to see it for what it is: a countermeasure to rigidities that ends up being anti-lean. The gist of this article is that we now have a better solution.

Have you ever wondered where all the overhead in your business is coming from? Transaction costs might be to blame, but luckily there are things you can do to minimize these. Lean methodology holds the keys to reducing the most readily addressable issues affecting transaction costs in your business.

While piecework is not as common as it used to be, perhaps you’re wondering if it would work in your business. For Lean practitioners especially, it’s important to consider how this would impact the culture of your workplace. Will workers still function as teams? Will productivity change?

Value stream mapping seems like a cryptic artificial constraint to the outsider, but it can actually be a powerful tool for your business. If you get past seeing this as a documentation exercise and explore the possibilities it exposes for operational improvements, you’ll see how a value stream map is worth your time.

Many people know about the two pillars of the Toyota Production System (TPS): just-in-time and jidoka, and they probably know the two principles of TPS – continuous improvement and respect for people.

In this blog, we’ll provide a solution to a common problem across all industries: insufficient standardization, leading to quality issues and inconsistent throughput rates.

Kaizen is a term you’ll hear thrown out casually in conversation with many manufacturing leaders. If you’ve been using context clues to get by this far, you’ve likely figured out that it has something to do with always improving. So what exactly is kaizen, and why are people talking about it?

Want a real challenge? I challenge you to find a factory with more than 20 people that doesn’t at least try to apply 5S.

You’ve probably encountered a scenario in which you needed to stop production to solve an issue causing defects. And you probably lost more productivity than you would have liked, especially if you didn't find out about it until a few hours later when someone casually mentioned the problem at the water cooler like it was common knowledge.

Lean companies talk about “respect for people'' as a key piece of the Lean mindset, but what does it mean? It means that those who are closest to the process and add value are the true experts when it comes to rapid and sustained kaizen and that the role of managers is to develop and empower them. 

Stacking inventory as a buffer is a common practice, but it often goes too far. In the worst cases, businesses produce everything ahead of time and then hope to sell it all, only to find that engineering made an urgent modification to the product or that the forecasts were way off.

There are likely many times you’ve encountered problems that arose from something being unclear. Communication is key, as the saying goes. That’s where visual management comes in.

One of the first steps toward adopting the Lean methodology is implementing the five S’s. You might have heard of these before, but we’re going to make it clear what these terms are, what they mean, and how you can use the 5S methodology to set a strong foundation for future operational improvements.

Have you ever gone through the steps of a process and thought, “Wow, that was easy”? If you have, there’s a chance that poka-yoke was involved. There’s a common refrain that good design goes unnoticed. Maybe that’s why you haven’t heard of poka-yoke until just now.

When you need to know what to produce, how much of it to produce, and what order to produce it in, you have a couple ways to approach the problem. You can push through orders and create piles of inventory, or you can pull orders continuously to keep your production flowing smoothly.

There’s a good reason you hear about Lean, Six Sigma, and probably Lean Six Sigma all the time as a manufacturing leader. It’s a powerful way to manage your production, and so contagious that proud practitioners of this method often include their certification next to their names like doctors or lawyers.

Implementing heijunka to level your production is a longstanding approach to manufacturing. However, it can bog down your business when it is used as a self-imposed, artificial constraint on production.

Ideally, your production process would achieve single piece flow and there would be no need for managing the process with a system for tracking what is where, and how much is needed. But because we don’t live in a perfect world, you will have to choose a system for managing your production process.

Maybe you’re familiar with just-in-time as a concept, but what’s this about a just-in-time workforce?

You’ve probably heard of Lean before. It’s the thing everyone is talking about, but nobody seems to be able to explain when you ask them about it. Is it a book? Can you do it without a teacher? Do you have to join a club to learn its secrets?

Many people today tout Lean Six Sigma as a common tool to drive process improvement across industries and functions.  You may think that the two are one in the same, but Lean methodology and Six Sigma are two distinct tools to achieve performance improvement smashed together under one banner: LSS.

Lean manufacturing is ready for its next iteration.  While Lean theory draws upon practices that have been around for centuries, the commonly practiced version of Lean today is somewhere between 60 and 80 years old dating back to the early days of TPS.