Let Us Help You Implement the LEAN Philosophy in Your Enterprise

“LEAN” is much more than an approach to improving manufacturing processes. It is a philosophy and culture that focuses on your entire business model, starting with your customer’s order, the delivery of that product or service and ending with the “cash”. Based on the Toyota Production System (TPS), LEAN is a way of looking at everything you do in order to identify “waste” as being anything that is “non-value added” from your customer’s perspective.

Simply put, if your customer is not willing to pay for any step in your process (including administrative processes), then it is “non-value added” and needs to be reduced or eliminated.

Traditional approaches often focus on how to make a person or machine work more efficiently, but the LEAN strategy involves attacking the steps that are attached to that process that are not transforming the product or service into what the customer wants. Examples are over-production, transportation, waiting, excess inventory, unnecessary motion, producing defects or the process itself.

Companies that actively pursue LEAN implementation can expect to see shorter lead times, higher quality, lower inventory levels, shorter order to cash cycles as well as shorter time for new product development.

However, LEAN is not a “magic pill” that you can take one time and you are done. It is a continuous improvement journey that requires commitment and the strong desire to improve your culture as well as your enterprise systems and processes.

How Total Insight Can Help You on Your Journey

Determining where you want to go is the first step in getting there. Total Insight offers a wide array of services and courses to assist you on your way. Just as in the Toyota Production System, the customer is the most important part of the process, so these services and implementation strategies can be modified to best fit your needs.

On-site LEAN Assessment

We never “prescribe before diagnosing”.  Total Insight helps your team to develop an understanding of the business through conducting an on-site assessment. This tool assists in defining the long-term goals, challenges and opportunities for improvement for any company (or industry) based on 23 different categories.

Each category has been created to set a baseline in comparing your company to “world class” LEAN companies based on Shingo Prize standards.

The on-site LEAN Assessment is a 2-4 day activity with our experienced solutions specialists who will perform an extensive review of your enterprise in order to provide your company a “one of a kind” solution. As a result of the assessment your team will receive detailed scoring on where your organization is currently performing against a benchmark which ranks from “beginning the journey” to “Shingo Prize ready” in each category.(The Shingo Prize is awarded annually to companies world-wide that have challenged for the prize and have exceeded certain levels of performance in principles, systems and tools throughout their enterprise.For more information, on the Shingo Prize, click here.

 
In addition to the scoring of each category, our Solutions Specialists will give you specific feedback on each category on what they see as opportunities for future improvement.  Combined with the scoring, our team will draw a high level value stream map with your team to visually depict where these opportunities exist in your processes.  From these two outputs, we will learn more about your supply chain so that we can better assist you in developing a future state that meets your strategic goals.  On-site coaching and/or training may typically follow an assessment to help your team begin (or further develop) their LEAN journey. 

Value Stream Mapping

Value Stream Mapping is a critical tool used to illustrate the flow of materials and information through an enterprise from “customer order-to-cash”. The Value Stream Map (VSM) will help you “visually” see the challenges and opportunities for improvement that exist in your operation from a LEAN perspective. This detailed map will assist your management team in identifying future projects, capital expenditures as well as determining where your kaizen events will have the biggest bottom line impact.

Taking a value stream approach means working on the big picture, not just individual processes, and improving the whole, not just optimizing the parts. Upon careful and detailed examination of your processes through VSM, it soon becomes obvious where improvement opportunities lie.

The real power of Value Stream mapping is not in defining where you are today but where you want to go.

Once the “current-state” map has been created, our team will work with you to develop your Future-state and Ideal-state maps. These maps give your company a clear vision of what and where you want to be in the near future as well as a direction to get there that everyone can see.

Kaizen Events

Kaizen is the Japanese word constructed from two ideographs, the first of which represents change and the second goodness or virtue. (Good change). Kaizen “events” are highly focused improvement activities designed to address and resolve important business issues and/or constraints.

Using a team of 6 to 8 associates from your organization and one of our experienced solutions specialists, these events aggressively analyze and explore a process to discover where opportunities for improvement exist. The team can then focus on defining and implementing immediate improvements.

These events are typically 3-5 days in length and provide associates the opportunity to be part of the solution and gain a better understanding of how LEAN can be applied to every aspect of any process.

Kaizen events result in powerful improvements that can have dramatic effects on safety, quality, delivery, cost, organization as well as lead time reductions.

5S Visual Workplace -Kaizen Event

5-S is considered to be an integral part of the LEAN foundation and creates a culture which perpetuates a clean, organized, safe and efficient workplace for all employees.

These events will have dramatic “visual impact” that will help lay the ground work for future Continuous Improvement efforts. It’s more than just cleaning. It is how a company can communicate without saying a word by using the power of visuals to drive corrective actions.

What results can you expect to achieve from a 5-S Kaizen?

• Reduced Search Time    
• Reduced Injuries
• Less Floor Space Required
• Improved Flow
• Better Visibility
• Improved Training
• Reduced Inventories
• Reduced Part Outages
• Reduced Downtime
• Reduced Changeover Time 
• Enhanced Quality
• Sustained improvements

Standardized Work-Kaizen Event

Standardized Work is the way of documenting the best known method of performing a given task without waste in respect to customer demand.  Working directly with the operators, these events develop the standards based on “best practices” of each member. These then become the way the process is to always be executed in order to achieve the highest quality, accuracy, safety with the minimal amount of waste.  Once these standards are in place, they are used for training and also become the baseline for future Continuous Improvement efforts. 

“Where this is no standard, there can be no Kaizen” (improvement). - Taiichi Ohno (Toyota)

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)-Kaizen Event

How would you like to be able to schedule your downtime when it is convenient instead of when the equipment is broken down and hindering the production of downstream processes?

TPM Events are focused specifically on avoiding costly and often time consuming machine break downs.  “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it” is NOT the approach you want your company to have when it comes to any piece of equipment that is critical to your operation.

Through a process of careful examination of a machine the Kaizen team will identify every potential problem and then proceed to correct and implement a strategy for sustaining the long term maintenance procedures. The action items are broken down into categories including frequency, procedure and owner of the item that can often be done by associates from the area instead of the maintenance department only.

By implementing TPM you will see improvements in machine down-time, reliability, quality, safety and cost of maintaining while avoiding future capital expenses. These improvements can also impact inventory as well as work-in-process levels in other areas of the process flow.

Setup Reduction (S.M.E.D.)-Kaizen Event

Single Minute Exchange of Die (also known as S.M.E.D.), is the LEAN tool used that can result in quick changeovers and setups that greatly reduce machine downtime and increase throughput. It is common to reduce machine changeover times from hours to minutes.

Just as in racing, every second off of the track is time that you are losing positions on the track. The difference between 1^st and last place is measured in seconds.  In a 14 second pit-stop race teams can change four tires, add 22 gallons of fuel, make adjustments to the car, clean the windshield and grill as well as give the driver something to drink!

You can apply this same aggressive approach to your own equipment and get your “race car” back up and in production. During a set-up-reduction event, teams will look at Materials, Methods, Manning and Machine (4-M’s) to uncover improvement ideas that can often lead to reductions in set up time of 50% or more!

Business Process-Kaizen Event
One of the biggest misconceptions concerning LEAN is that it does not apply in an administrative environment or that it is only used in manufacturing.  This cannot be further from being the truth.  In fact, in some companies, office processes can account for almost 80% of the lead time to the customer.

Now imagine the competitive edge that you could gain by reducing lead-time, time from “order to cash”, internal cycle times, while improving information accuracy, organization and creating standard work processes that can be easily trained. The reality is that just about every LEAN tool can be easily utilized to improve your office (administrative) environment.  

Additional Kaizen Tools

Poka-Yoke- mistake proofing

Heijunka- production smoothing

Kanban- inventory management

“Pull” System implementation

MDI- managing for daily improvement

3-P – Production Preparation Process

Click here to see other course offerings for training classes and culture development.