Lean Management

You have probably heard about the “Toyota Production System”. The production system that has been practiced and continually refined for decades and that eliminates all waste.

• 5 S ⇒ a tool for tidying up, cleaning and standardizing in production
• SMED is a tool for quick tool changes to keep batch sizes small and thereby minimize inventories
• Kaizen ⇒ continuous improvement. These are small steps that are necessary but take too long to create a breakthrough, so only in conjunction with:
• These are workshops that achieve major changes in production, usually requiring 30% less space, increasing output and the like
• KPIs ⇒ Key performance indicators are defined and then tracked daily. This results in measures that can be implemented quickly, see Kaizen
• Production progress figures ⇒ the production output of each individual machine is tracked hourly in order to identify the real bottlenecks.
• APU structure ⇒ Autonomous production units. Works within the plant are created to strengthen the entrepreneurship of the individual department heads.
• One-piece flow ⇒ No buffers between operations. This means that any problem becomes apparent immediately and the production line has to be stopped. This causes pain and everyone tries to solve the problem quickly. That‘s intentional. Large warehouses between the individual production units hide the problems because they do not come to the surface so quickly.

There are plenty of additional tools that break “the wheel of waste,” but I’ve listed just the most popular ones above. I have been deeply rooted in the Toyota Production System since 2000 and have applied it countless times in the industry. I can support you with the introduction.