• Home
• Training
  • Featured Training
  • Schedule
  • Registration Form
• News
  • Special!! Case Study
  • Articles
    • Lean is about Minimizing Waste
    • Lean is about Maximizing Value
    • Lean Public Service?
• PROJECTS 2006-2007
  • Public Sector
  • Private Sector
• Resources
• Contact Us

ARTICLE 2: Lean is about Maximizing Value

Lean Manufacturing is manufacturing with the customer in mind.  Five Principles of Lean are defined by Womack and Jones, co-authors of the revolutionary Lean texts ‘The Machine that Changed the World’ and ‘Lean Thinking’.

The first principle is the specification of value from the point of view of the customer.  Value is anything the customer would happily pay for if it appears on his/her invoice.  Paying overtime for the forklift driver to shuffle goods from one area of the plant to other would probably not be among the items that customers would pay for with a smile if they were made aware of the fact that they were paying for it.

The second principle involves mapping your value stream.  The current state and the ideal future state are mapped out with the aim of eliminating anything that does not create value for the customer.

The third principle is creating flow.  This means arranging operations so that they flow in a tight sequence one after the other almost like water flowing from a pipe.  It involves the elimination of batch processing where work-in-process sits on the floor between operations, waiting to go the next process.

Principle four or ‘pull’ means that nothing is produced unless it is called for (externally or internally).  This contrasts with traditional ‘push’ production where sometimes components or entire products are produced when not really required by the customer or by the next process.  One example of push production is the production of items that are produced today and placed in a warehouse to await the arrival of packaging (in a week’s time).  These goods are then packaged and returned to the warehouse to await a customer.  Traditional MRP Systems typically force a plant to adopt a 'push' production system.

Principle five deals with perfection.  It advocates that the ideal benchmark is excellence therefore a company must always be in pursuit of excellence.  It is interesting to note that while there are many outstanding examples of companies that used lean to gain market leadership positions, benchmarking against these or other companies is generally not encouraged.

Just imagine if Dell, Federal Express or Coca Cola had limited themselves by trying to be like some other company!!