LEAN OPERATIONS

Lean Operations

Part A LEAN OPERATIONS

Introduction

The survival of companies in a globalized market, where there are no more frontiers for competition and any bad move can offer significant risk to any organization, associated with the pressure from competition and the search for a competitive advantage, has forced companies to rethink strategies and how to manage their businesses. Literature shows that companies have perceived that the management model adopted is not appropriate for their reality. (Sterling, 2003, 25-70)

This has given rise to the need to analyze new managerial practices and to implement a model that provides, among other objectives, cost reductions, increased quality in products and greater flexibility to quickly meet market demands. Lean manufacturing has done wonder in dominating and playing a key role for the design as well as operations in the UK and in the field of manufacturing industries as well. Lean Operations is both a methodology and philosophy that focuses on eliminating waste and reducing the time between a customer's order and delivery. By trimming waste, companies? Are Manufacturers of goods and providers of services alike? Can they achieve higher quality, increased productivity, improved customer interactions?

Lean Operations redefines waste as anything the customer won't pay for everything from clerical errors to idle machine operators. The process identifies seven types of waste:

•Waiting for products, personnel, parts, and the availability of machines.

•Transportation time for equipment and parts needed for repairs.

•Processes duplicate data entry, inefficient stocking.

•Excessive inventory.

•Overproduction.

Literature Review

Lean is a process improvement methodology that was modeled on the Toyota Production System developed by Toyota and described by Taiichi Ohno, Lean focuses on the elimination of wastes and creating value for customers. Lean, although it includes many process improvement tools, is primarily a philosophy of constant improvement. Changing the mindset of everyone within a company is, consequently, a necessity. A lean enterprise represents the shop floor, office processes, and administrative processes. Lean has traditionally focused on manufacturing or the shop floor; however, its basic principles are applicable to any part of an enterprise. Recently, more literature has focused on applying lean concepts to nonmanufacturing administration and office processes, accounting, and product and process development. Even though the interest in applying lean concepts to nonmanufacturing areas of an enterprise is growing, most organizations implementing lean are still only applying lean principles to their manufacturing operations. (Sterling, 2003, 25-70)

So in order to create a new environment where a company can implement this process of lean processing, despite seeing large manufacturing improvements, lean transformations frequently fail due to the lack of enterprise wide acceptance. In particular, applying lean concepts to the administration and office sections of the enterprise are vitally important to both support and aid lean manufacturing practitioners. In implementing the lean operations in manufacturing a part, administrative functions makeup 60 to 80 percent of all cost associated with meeting a customer demand.

These administrative functions include completing forms and other paper work, quoting and invoicing customers, and other nonmanufacturing ...