Manufacturers have always been on the lookout for new ways to reduce inefficiencies and waste. In fact, it’s been this way since the Industrial Revolution itself.
So it’s an integral part of the culture of industry to want to do things cleaner, quicker, and leaner. And that’s why so many companies are looking for lean manufacturing systems to help them get there.
This is what we’ll take you through today, from the problems lean manufacturing tools solve, to how to choose the right one for you.
In this blog, learn:
- Why lean manufacturing is important
- How continuous improvement reduces waste
- Which processes lean manufacturing tools help with
- Before production
- Standardisation
- Shop Floor Management
- Auditing
- Maintenance
- Communication
- An all-in-one solution vs specific lean manufacturing tools
- Meet the mPS (mlean Production System)
Why lean manufacturing is important
We began this post by mentioning the Industrial Revolution, the reason we have a manufacturing sector in the first place. Since those early days of mass production, it’s safe to say that things have changed a little.
Though the profit motive means that there’s always a reason to reduce inefficiencies and waste, events outside the shop floor can have a dramatic effect on how factories do business.
The factories of old competed with each other in smaller marketplaces. Now, with globalised supply chains and customer bases, factories are having to deal with a much more fragmented, complex, and competitive market.
Without innovating your productive systems and processes, you risk falling behind, and failing to grasp the potential of new technologies.
This is precisely why lean manufacturing is so important.
Lean manufacturing, by improving how your productive systems work together and making your plant more agile, allows you to respond more quickly to changing circumstances and get more from what you have already.
And it works hand in hand with another important production method: continuous improvement.
How continuous improvement reduces waste
There’s nothing more fatal to your drive for increased productivity and reduced waste than a process allowed to become a fact of life.
In reality, every single aspect of your production chain can be altered, slimmed down, supplemented; in other words, improved.
That’s why continuous improvement is viewed by so many manufacturers as the perfect cure for complacency.
By involving your staff in a continuous improvement process, you can increase their level of engagement and reduce turnover.
And the small changes you make across your line will help you reduce costs and improve efficiency. Why?
Because you’re now always looking for ways to improve. You’ll be running tests and reporting results. Your team will be giving you new ideas.
And with the right software in place, your entire process will be pointed towards its own improvement.
Which processes lean manufacturing tools help with
Lean manufacturing tools on the market can help improve every stage of your existing process, from pre to post-production cycles.
Let’s take a look at how each part of your chain could be made leaner with digital tools.
Before production
The pre-production stage of your process is critical to a successful lean rollout. Here you can address underlying issues before they affect the quality of your product, and iron creases in your production line.
Traditionally, this kind of analysis involved a lot of manual admin and reporting.
As any manufacturing professional will tell you, it can be difficult to get accurate, up-to-date information from the production lines at the best of times, let alone put together a plan to act on this information.
With a lean manufacturing system that focuses on the pre-production analysis stage, you can get this information much more quickly and easily. And thanks to AI-powered solutions, you can also have your system generate quick improvement ideas based on data inputs.
Standardisation
A huge part of making your processes predictable is standardising them. Once standardised, it’s much easier to train staff on best practices, establish effective workflows, and ultimately make your production line run smoothly.
However, to standardise effectively, you need to make changes that can cause disruption.
And you need to ensure that everyone has the right information at hand at the right place and time.
Digitising your standardisation process is a great way to ensure that implementation is balanced and seamless.
From Visual Standards to Skill Matrix, moving standardisation from analogue to digital methods can save your team a lot of teething pains.
Shop Floor Management
Your day-to-day operations need to be slick and efficient for your factory to be competitive. Depending on 20th-century tools in a modern market won’t get you there.
Instead, you could level up your shop floor management tools with digital alternatives that keep your teams aligned, spot wasteful practices, create new routines, and improve visibility with dashboards and more.
This is a great option if you want to solve immediate problems or inefficiencies in areas like line changes, personnel management, or reporting workflows. And it’ll also help your pre-production phase because you’ll know you’re not sending materials out to a wasteful shop floor.
If you’re specifically interested in lean software for shop floor management, be sure to look for a tool that will help you with daily or weekly KPIs and targets. This is where you’ll get bang for your buck, and is the area this software will help you with the most.
Auditing
Audits can present real headaches for manufacturers, especially in regulation-heavy industries like automotive and food.
Alongside standard and generic audits, you may need to create specific auditing flows at different times, and keeping all this paperwork organised presents a challenge many will be familiar with.
Digital auditing software lightens the burden significantly.
Not only will this take care of file management, eliminating spreadsheet nightmares familiar to everyone in a supervisory role, but it can also help you build and maintain audit runs.
Like every other kind of lean manufacturing system, these kinds of digital upgrades will free up time, improve your accuracy and quality of work, and potentially reduce costs, too.
Maintenance
Machine downtime, accidents, and quality issues always have the power to trip you up, no matter how effective your processes are elsewhere.
Maintenance is therefore critical to successful lean manufacturing. And, as you might have guessed, there’s software to help you.
A centralised store of information could be all you need to improve your maintenance drills. Imagine keeping all your troubleshooting documents and media in one place to access along your lines when they’re needed. Even this one upgrade could mean a great deal for daily operations.
Combine this with a dashboard that helps you organise your line checks, tasks, and scheduled reviews, and you’ve cut a significant amount of slack from your manual processes.
Communication
Digital lean manufacturing tech can solve a significant issue facing all factories: who knows what, and when.
With traditional methods of communication, managers and supervisors had their work cut out in making sure information gleaned from the line was available to everyone who needed it.
Think daily status update meetings, or company-wide bulletins.
With a lean manufacturing system that everyone feeds into, separated by level of access and work area, you quickly gain a single source of truth throughout your organisation.
And if there’s a miscommunication or something slips through the cracks, you can easily spot where and how.
This can aid not only a single plant but a whole group if deployed across a network of factories.
An all-in-one solution vs specific lean manufacturing systems
Given the different ways you could use lean manufacturing software in your plant, you now have a choice to make. Do you opt for a tool that helps you in a specific area? Or do you go for something more comprehensive that can help your factory across multiple sections?
This choice is made more difficult by the promises made by various tools on the market. Though one, for example, may specialise in auditing software, they may also offer solutions for maintenance, and so on.
Careful research is needed to establish exactly which tools are best suited for your situation.
So here’s a quick rule of thumb for any factory manager browsing the market:
- If you’re relatively optimised across your line except for one critical area, take a look for a specific tool – it may end up saving you money versus an all-in-one solution.
- If you’re unsure about which production process you need help with, or your plant is under-optimised, a comprehensive solution will help you level up more effectively.
Once you’ve found an option that looks right, be sure to speak to their support team to understand exactly what their tool can offer you.
If they have a good sales process, you’ll have the space to explain how your factory works, where your weaknesses lie, and what a successful solution would look like for your team.
Meet the mPS (mlean Production System)
The mlean Production System (mPS) is the most comprehensive lean manufacturing software on the market.
From pre- to post-production, the mPS works with your team to continuously improve your processes, running the full range from shop floor management to auditing, maintenance, and more.
In fact, it covers all the areas of production listed above.
And because it’s a modular system, we’ll build a package of tools that suits your specific situation.
All you need to do is book a discovery call with our Sales team so they can learn about your factory and its challenges.
Get started today!
