The Power of Lean Manufacturing

There are quite a few powerful manufacturing strategies that help companies like ours stay competitive. Just-in-Time production (JIT), Kaizen, Kanban system, and Lean manufacturing are a few of the strategies that drive us to deliver best-in-class products and services when it comes to our customers for investment castings.

Among other things, a robust manufacturing strategy allows us to:

• Stay resilient
• Be cost-effective
• Manufacture to the highest standards of quality

This is where lean manufacturing plays a powerful role in our approach to making precision castings.

What is lean manufacturing?

As production methods go, the term lean manufacturing is self-explanatory. A company that does everything it can to reduce waste, and increase efficiency is said to be lean. Lean manufacturing or lean production, or simply, lean, is characterised by:

• Minimising waste (any activity that does not add value to the production process)
• Maximising productivity (streamlining processes, empowering employees etc.)
• Improvement in quality (directly translates to greater value for customers)

The biggest advantage of lean manufacturing, therefore, is that it helps a company amp up its efficiency in every possible way. Lean manufacturing works on a few important principles.

Drivers behind lean manufacturing

Quite a few principles are pivotal to lean manufacturing. Here are a few of them:

Kaizen: continuously striving to improve / change for the better is at the heart of Kaizen. Areas such as quality, costs, logistics, safety, and outlook to work are few of the areas where Kaizen can be applied.

Value: here, value is defined solely from the customer’s perspective. This dictates the amount of money that a customer is willing to pay for a product/service. This in turn, dictates what the company must do to achieve this optimal price.

Waste: skills, processes, inventory, resources of all kinds, and workflow are few of the areas where waste of different kinds can be produced. By mapping the value stream in all areas, companies that are lean are successful in eliminating waste or activities that are not contributing to the efficient production of goods & services.

Flow: smooth work processes ensure that every component and every individual is working in the correct manner. Functional barriers need to be identified and removed so that all aspects of manufacturing are like a pristine symphony!

The five principles of lean

1. Value – as needed by the customer
2. Value stream – mapping out all the processes that go into making a product
3. Flow – operational processes of the production ecosystem
4. Pull – produce and store only what is necessary – think JIT
5. Perfection – strive for the same, think Kaizen!

The power of lean manufacturing lies in its ability to reduce or even eliminate waste, improve all production processes, increase operational efficiency across almost all aspects of production, create a team that is empowered, and make a business delightfully agile.

And when the outcome of all these principles is to deliver maximum value to customers, it stands to logic that a company like Texmo Blank embraces lean manufacturing, a transformative philosophy, with total commitment.