Make your Business a Lean Business by Paul C. Husby & Jerome Hamilton

Make Your Business a Lean Business

“How to Create Enduring Market Leadership”

Paul C. Husby & Jerome Hamilton

The lean enterprise is achieved by the elimination of eight specific forms of waste:

Overproduction – making more than what is needed based on customer demand
Transport – excessive movement of materials
Motion – inefficient movement of people
Waiting – underutilization of people
Inventory – material laying around unused (often a symptom of another waste)
Overprocessing – manufacturing to an unnecessary quality standard. More than expected by the customer
Defect Correction – time spent fixing defects, including the part that gets thrown away and the time it takes to make the product correctly
Underutilized talent and skills

The Lean enterprise must adapt a waste consciousness and sensitivity, striving daily for zero waste in all organizational activities and at all organizational levels. Waste elimination leads to a greater speed through reduced cycle times in all processes both operational and transactional.  A significant consequence of waste elimination is radically reduced cost.  In addition, this maniacal focus on waste elimination, driven by a pursuit of zero waste, also stimulates break-through innovations in practices, processes, and product. An example is eliminating inventory, which catalyzed practices like level scheduling, mixed model manufacturing.  The key point is that the pursuit of perfection requires discarding current practices that cannot advance performance and inventing new practices that can. When this is embedded in the DNA of a company/organization, it drives increased customer satisfaction by rendering reduced lead time, enhanced customer flexibility, competitive pricing, and improved quality.  Realizing the purpose of the Lean Enterprise is cultural.  It requires training and engaging the entire workforce to have eyes for waste and to target eliminating waste daily.  From a business perspective, it also requires the alignment of the entire workforce around achieving the annual business objectives through processes like Hoshin Kanri, where strategic and operations planning meet together, identifying appropriate methods.

It must be acknowledged and recognized that the total understanding of Lean in all of its dimensions and contributions to system improvement will be a lifelong pursuit.

Find Details in our book: Make Your Business a Lean Business or Visit our website: https://synapticflow.ai

Jerome Hamilton