If you want to improve quality while reducing waste, lean manufacturing is vital.
Lean manufacturing is a set of practices designed to reduce waste and enhance productivity. Lean manufacturing is a popular concept in today’s economic and cultural climate. But many manufacturers struggle to put lean manufacturing into practice.
If you want to improve as a manufacturer, you need to master lean manufacturing techniques.
This article explains how to implement lean manufacturing in your company. With these tips, you can reduce waste and cut costs without harming your products.
Invest in Continuous Improvement
There are several lean manufacturing techniques that companies can invest in. One is to improve their efficiency and productivity. Continuous improvement means constantly seeking ways to improve processes and eliminate waste.
It is an important lean management technique. This is because it helps ensure that companies are always improving and moving forward.
Understand the Causes of Big Losses
In any organization, losses happen due to many reasons. There can be losses because of:
- faulty products
- over-production
- process inefficiencies
- scrap
- rework
And the list goes on if no action is taken. To sustain and grow in the market, any manufacturing organization needs to understand the root causes of these losses and work continuously to eliminate them.
Monitor Your Machine
One of the top lean manufacturing techniques to help monitor your machine is to keep a close eye on your equipment’s performance. You can identify issues early on and take corrective action. This is to prevent problems from occurring.
Additionally, monitoring your equipment’s performance can help you improve your overall manufacturing process.
Keep Track of Your Overall Equipment Effectiveness
Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is a widely used metric in Lean manufacturing. OEE is a measure of how well a manufacturing process is performing in terms of its designed capacity.
In other words, it is a measure of how much “value-added” time is available from a process. Value-added time is the time during which the process is performing its intended function. OEE is calculated by looking at three factors:
Availability
This is the percentage of time that the process is available to produce. Downtime, for any reason, reduces availability.
Performance
This is a measure of how close the process comes to its theoretical maximum output. Performance is affected by factors such as setup time, yield, and speed.
Quality
This is a measure of the number of good units produced by the process, compared to the number of units that could have been produced. Quality includes factors such as:
- scrap
- rework
- defects
OEE is a powerful metric because it provides a way to track the overall performance of a process. By looking at the three factors that make up OEE, manufacturing processes can be improved in a targeted way.
Implement These Lean Manufacturing Techniques
To improve your manufacturing process and increase efficiency, it is important to consider implementing lean manufacturing techniques. These techniques can help to eliminate waste, optimize production, and improve quality control. By making these small changes, you can improve your bottom line and better compete in today’s marketplace.
Should you wish to find more reads aside from this basic Lean Manufacturing guide, visit our blog.
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