Lean production

28.1 Introduction

The rise of this Japanese approach to production has been unstoppable. The whole approach has been termed 'lean production', though its ideas have been spread more generally to include service businesses as well. It is based upon a combined focus by management and workers on minimising the use of the key business resources: materials, manpower, capital, floor space and time. The main components of lean management are:

• JIT
• TQM 
• time-based management.

28.2 The benefits of lean production

Lean production:

• creates higher levels of labour productivity, therefore it uses less labour.
• requires less stock, less factory space and less capital equipment than a mass producer of comparable size, the lean producer therefore has substantial cost advantges over the mass producer.
• creates substantial marketing advantages: first, it results in far fewer defects, improving quality and relaibility for the customer; second, lean production requires half for the engineering hours to develop a new product, which means that the lean producer can develop a vast range of products that a mass producer cannot afford to match.

28.3 The components of lean production

Lean people management:

• Lean producers reject the waste of human talent involved in narrow, repetitive jobs. They believe in empowerment, team working and job enrichment. Problem solving is not just left to specialist engineers. Employees are trained in preventative maintenence, to spot when a fault is developing and correct it before the production line has to stop. If a problem does emerge on the line, they are trained to solve it without needing an engineer or supervisor. Teams meet regularly to discuss ways in which their sections could be run more smoothly. 

Lean approach to quality:

• In a mass production system, quality control is a specialised job that takes place at the end of the line. In a lean system, each team is responsible for checking the quality of its own work. If a fault is spotted, every worker has the power to stop the assembly line. This policy prevents errors being passed on, to be corrected only after the fault has been found at the end of the line. The lean approach, therefore, is self-checking at every production stage so that quality failures at the end become extremely rare.
• One way to achieve lean quality is TQM. This attempts to achieve a culture of quality throughout the organisation, so that the primary objective of all employees is to achieve quality the first time around without the need for any reworking. To acheive TQ, managers must 'make quality number one, non-negotiable priority, and actively seek and listen to the views of employees on how to improve quality'.

Lean design:

• As consumers become…