Lean System

Lean manufacturing or lean production, often simply "lean", is a systematic method for the
elimination of waste ("Muda") within a manufacturing system. Lean takes into account waste
created through overburden ("Muri") and waste created through unevenness in workloads
("Mura"). Working from the perspective of the client who consumes a product or service,
"value" is any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for.
Essentially, lean is centered on making obvious what adds value by reducing everything else.
Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production
System (TPS) (hence the term Toyotism is also prevalent) and identified as "lean" only in the
1990s. TPS is renowned for its focus on reduction of the original Toyota seven wastes to
improve overall customer value, but there are varying perspectives on how this is best
achieved. The steady growth of Toyota, from a small company to the world's largest
automaker, has focused attention on how it has achieved this success.

The 7 Wastes of Lean Manufacturing

 Transportation Waste  
Transport is the movement of materials from one location to another, this is a waste as it adds
zero value to the product. Why would your customer (or you for that matter) want to pay for
an operation that adds no value?
Transport adds no value to the product, you as a business are paying people to move material
from one location to another, a process that only costs you money and makes nothing for you.
The waste of Transport can be a very high cost to your business, you need people to operate it
and equipment such as trucks or fork trucks to undertake this expensive movement of
materials.

 Inventory Waste
Excess material, work in process or finished goods.  Excess inventory represents cash tied up
in the form of material, which is difficult to turn into cash quickly.  Inventory also takes up
space.  It has to be managed, stored and can become obsolete leading to scrap.   The quality
of inventory can deteriorate over a period of time, especially perishable items such as food or
rubber seals.

 Unnecessary motion Waste

 Unnecessary motions are those movements of man or machine which are not as small or as
easy to achieve as possible, by this I mean bending down to retrieve heavy objects at floor
level when they could be fed at waist level to reduce stress and time to retrieve. Excessive
travel between work stations, excessive machine movements from start point to work start
point are all examples of the waste. All of these wasteful motions cost you time (money) and
cause stress on your employees and machines, after all even robots wear out.

 Waiting Time Waste

The Waste of Waiting disrupts flow, one of the main principles of Lean Manufacturing, as
such it is one of the most serious of the seven wastes or 7 mudas of lean manufacturing it is
easily identifiable as lost time due to poor flow: parts shortages, bottlenecks, and equipment
breakdowns.  In an office based environment, this may take the form of slow software
loading times or waiting for an important phone call.  This is also frustrating for the
employees involved, which can lead to reduced morale.

 Overproduction Waste
Over production is the most important of the 7 types of waste.  It is building more of a
product than the customer ordered or wanted.  Remembering that waste is anything for which
the customer is not willing to pay, it is easy to see why over production is a waste.  However
over production actually drives all of the other six types of waste as well.  The excess product
now has to be stored somewhere which means excess motion, transportation and inventory. 
Also, over production means that if a reject is found, there will be more units that need to be
reworked. The aim should be to make only what is required when it is required by the
customer, the philosophy of Just in Time (JIT), however many companies work on the
principle of Just in Case.

 Process Waste 
This is work that adds no value for the customer or business.  This usually takes the form of
over engineering a product: unnecessary features that the customer does not use, but that
increase the cost to the business.  This could be maintaining paint finish or other tolerances,
more tightly than is required by the customer.  Another example is building a product that
will last for five years when the customer is going to replace it after two.

 The Waste of Defects

The most obvious of the seven wastes, although not always the easiest to detect before they
reach your customers. Quality errors that cause defects invariably cost you far more than you
expect. Every defective item requires rework or replacement, it wastes resources and
materials, it creates paperwork, and it can lead to lost customers.
The Waste of Defects should be prevented where possible, better to prevent than to try to
detect them, implementation of pokayoke systems and automation can help to prevent defects
from occurring.

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