What is the key to the success of Lean Management?

A key factor for the success of an implementation project Lean Management is range defined for the project. If efforts are focused on optimizing a fraction of the company without acting on the rest, neither the overall productivity nor effective yield of the company. It will be useless, for example, to optimize the entire manufacturing of a product, if there is a highly inefficient. Suppose that initially it is manufactured and shipped every 10 days, with a workforce of 15 workers in the factory and 2 in shipping. If manufacturing is optimized until the product is obtained in 5 days with 12 workers and the dispatch planning or its operating guidelines are not modified, a product would continue to be sent every 10 days. Moreover, the initial reduction in operators would reverse over time, since personnel would be needed to identify, handle and transport the high volume of product stock manufactured but not shipped, in addition to the need to set up and maintain the space for this purpose.

This is a very simplified example, which is easily understood by contemplating two processes directly related and arranged downstream in the direction of product flow to the customer. However, the results of projects optimization with a partial approach, to the merely productive area, they respond to this same pattern. Yes, the implementation of Lean methods in a production line can be successfully carried out, but only if all the departments that carry out activities, of any type, related, in any way, to the processes of said line are jointly optimized.

A production line must be considered together with the department that designs both the products and the processes, with the section that purchases the necessary materials and equipment and, of course, with the sales department that establishes the demand both in terms of volume and delivery times.

The key to the success of the Lean methodology is to structure and manage the company in such a way that there is a single goal: obtain the final product that satisfies the customer with the minimum cost. Special mention should be made of:

• The need for plan and level the demand. Improvement tools, such as kanban, flexible cells or others, will not be able to operate correctly in a chaotic framework of production needs. A company that works with a system Lean can absorb without problems certain changes of the plans, but not continuous, drastic and sudden changes; And most importantly, you don't have to either. A commercial or sales department managed with a focus Lean make a master plan based on annual management forecasts, historical data, business plans, and it will be corrected periodically and frequently with information from sales representatives and customer orders. The master plan is focused on planning production, so it will be expressed, not in monetary terms, but in terms of products, to indicate production and purchasing needs. With this roadmap, production can be planned without too many surprises.
• The obligation to define correctly the product before it reaches the production line. This means that not only the product is optimally designed, but also each and every one of the processes, in such a way that their quality is ensured and the time of manual and machine operation is established. This duly documented and organized information will be necessary to design the cells or work teams according to the volume of demand. It is not possible to manufacture optimally without knowing precisely what to do, how to do it y in how much time must be done.

The manufacture of custom products is not an impediment to the adoption of a system Lean Management. The above conditions must simply be respected. If we admit the need to study and detail the way to manufacture a product that is manufactured in series, the production of a product that has not been manufactured before must be analyzed even more.