Lean Manufacturing

Abstract

An important goal of lean manufacturing is to speed up response times from suppliers and consumers as well as times spent in the production system. It has a tight relationship to another idea known as just-in-time manufacturing (JIT manufacturing in short). Just-in-time manufacturing prioritises productivity, effectiveness, and waste reduction for the producer and supplier of goods in an effort to match output to demand by only supplying items that have been ordered. It also places a strong emphasis on continual development. By further removing tasks that do not offer any value for the client, lean manufacturing takes the just-in-time strategy and focuses on reducing cycle, flow, and throughput times. People who work in customer service and marketing, for example, are also involved in lean manufacturing.

Lack of readily accessible reference implementations that show how directly implementing lean manufacturing tools and techniques may work and the impact it does have provide a problem in bringing lean to services. Building the level of belief thought to be required for effective implementation is made more challenging as a result. However, some studies link the fundamental ideas of lean to well-known success stories in retail and even the airline industry.  It is still necessary to more successfully "translate" the direct manufacturing examples of "techniques" or "tools" into a service context in order to support the more well-known implementation approaches, which have not yet received the level of work or publicity that would serve as starting points for implementors.