Avoiding lean manufacturing failure

If you are not careful with lean manufacturing, meaning you do not implement it correctly or use it in the correct way, you have a high chance of failing. If your company fails with lean manufacturing you actually increase, your chances of having your company fail. The reason that your company can fail if you fail with lean manufacturing is that lean manufacturing is a system that you are putting into [place to help improve your manufacturing so that you can keep your customers happy. With lean manufacturing, you are going to be focusing on ways to reduce costs, which will be done by getting rid of anything that does not add value to your manufacturing process. If you do not get rid of the waste in your manufacturing plant you will end up losing money, which can led to the failure of your business because you can lose all of your customers.

One of the most common ways that people fail with lean manufacturing is not being prepared, so to avoid lean manufacturing failure you will need to make sure that you are prepared to implement lean manufacturing. You cannot expect lean manufacturing to be implemented overnight, so if you are serious about implementing lean manufacturing you will need to put forth the time and effort required to make the switch. To do this you will need to figure out ahead of the time the costs that are going to be associated with converting to lean manufacturing, you will also need to determine if you need to purchase anything to make the conversion.

Something else that you will need to do is make sure that you get the right kind of training for lean manufacturing. To ensure that you do not get the wrong kind of training for lean manufacturing you will want to do some basic research on the companies that offer lean manufacturing training, so that you can choose the instructors for your training that will best meet your needs. When interviewing instructors you want to find out about what kind of tools that they plan to use to teach you about lean manufacturing, how they recommend implementing lean manufacturing, and anything else that could possibly affect the training that they are providing.

Down time is an important part of lean manufacturing, so you will need to make sure that you implement it correctly. Implementing down time does not mean allowing your employees to sit and talk during slow periods, if this happens your company is actually losing money. What you need to do is implement a process that your employees can follow during down time because with any kind of manufacturing work there is going to be down time, whether the machines need to get moved or the machine breaks down. If you are experiencing down time whether scheduled or not you will need to make sure that, there is other work for your employees to do. For example, if a machine shuts down unexpectedly your employees should take advantage of that down time to clean up their work area. You can also have them clean up their work areas when there is scheduled maintenance on machines. Scheduling down time can help prevent the unscheduled down time that causes your company to lose money.

The last thing you need to be aware of with lean manufacturing failure is your employees failing you. This usually happens when your employees are not giving you 100%. To avoid this kind of failure you will want to do everything that you can to keep your employees happy and motivated because the happier your employees are the more productive they will be. One way to keep your employees motivated and happy is to offer them rewards for the hard work they are doing. The rewards can be raises or bonuses for achieving certain goals.