Lean Business Solutions

Are you a manufacturer confused about where to start on your business improvement journey?

There may be a number of questions in your mind with regard to Lean within business such as:

• What is Lean Manufacturing?
• How can Lean Manufacturing benefit my business?
• Is Lean just for manufacturing?

To help answer some of these questions and to deliver business-critical Lean Interventions and Training, Lean-U Ltd are Associates of the highly respected company Lean Business Solutions Limited, established by Phil Hanson and Kerry Cochran.

Lean Business Solutions Limited has established itself as a class Leader in the field of Lean Interventions and Training and works with some of the biggest names within Manufacturing, and is developing Lean Interventions away from Manufacturing in attempt to bring Lean principles to a brand new audience.

Although used as a generic term ‘Lean Manufacturing’ refers to the specific management of people and processes associated with the Toyota Production System. These often yield significant improvements in Operational performance for companies that commit to their introduction and very often the techniques are then utilised to create value up and downstream from manufacturing, from the Supply Chain through to Distribution.

Companies that commit to ‘Lean-Manufacturing’ can see a step-change in performance and often outperform their particular sector with regard to the Key Business Metrics of On-Time Delivery, Gross Margin, Stock Turns, Absenteeism, Staff Turnover, Space utilisation et al.

Various Lean terminologies are used to describe the improvement processes utilised to create a step-change in performance. These include 5S, Kaizen, SMED, PLM, OEE, Standard Operations, Six Sigma;  there are very many different descriptions of improvement methodologies.

One of the issues the majority of businesses face when approaching a Lean Implementation is the fallout from earlier attempts to embrace new production technologies. It has been proven that the more attempts a business has had to introduce new improvement programs the more issues there are with an anti-improvement mindset – “we’ve done Lean before and it doesn’t work” shows that some businesses feel that it’s something that they can take off the shelf.

The more enlightened business Manager knows that Lean can only give you what you give the system in terms of focus and discipline.
It is also proven that a workforce is not the reason behind the majority of Lean implementation failures. Managers who can’t be bothered to change at the same rate as their workforce are often the reason for failure. A resistance to change and a belligerent attitude to ‘trying new things’ takes over – the people who lose out the most are the employees whose future is wrapped up in that of the business.