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.

You’ll sometimes hear inventory referred to as “crystallized capacity,” the idea being that when you have limited capacity, building inventory is a solution that helps you meet customer demand. The typical example is a seasonal business, like a manufacturer of skiing equipment. 

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.

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.