How Lean Manufacturing Impacts Your Customers

Lean manufacturing helps to provide your customers with better products and services. When you opt for lean manufacturing over other programs you will find that you can reduce your inventory and a number of things in order to give you a stronger, successful company. Your orders will be delivered on time and your customers will find that the products you provide to them are of higher quality. Reducing waste and improving productivity are two of the biggest components that help to create a lean manufacturing environment.

What are your customers needs and wants? Are you satisfying your customers right now or do they feel that your company can improve? Customers want quality and they will come to expect a certain level of results from your organization. When you do not feed into their expectations, it will lead to frustration and can easily cause you to have massive failures. So what can you do in order to benefit your customers in some way? How can you find a way to improve your company and products to satisfy their needs? It all starts with the raw materials that you use.

Raw materials will be converted into finished products. You must be able to understand which raw materials are going to give you the best possible finished product. Shopping around to find better materials to work with can offer your customers higher quality products, which they are desirous of.

Not only do you have to look at the raw materials it is also important that you consider the manufacturing process as well. Do you have equipment that needs to be serviced? What about equipment that is outdated? Can you afford to bring in new equipment?

Customers are your most important asset and you must do what you can in order to properly satisfy them. The supply chain that you have needs to be evaluated multiple times in order for you to understand where product defects may be occurring and what you need to fix along the way to create better products for the customers.

With lean manufacturing you will focus on total company improvement and not just focusing on fixing one simple thing here and there. It is a company-wide program that needs attention and each employee you have will fulfill a different role in the company. Perhaps your system is great and the machinery is wonderful but it's the employees that are causing issues to occur. They may not understand their role properly or they may be performing their own modifications to the system you have taught. Due to this it is important that your staff goes through a mandatory training program to help you create a better company and one that will be efficient.

When you think lean you are thinking smart. The goal is to reduce your waste as much as possible. Waste comes from a number of sources from the way in which you have purchased the raw materials to the system that they follow in order to become a finished good. With lean you will end up fixing the problems in the company and you will make your products ready to order instead of keeping a large inventory on stock. A big inventory often ends up leading to a lot of cost problems as they will just sit there until they are sold and they continue to lose their value during this time.

The mindset of your employees will need to improve in order to provide you with a better product and an efficient and effective company. If you want to offer the best to your customers you need to have only the best employees, the best materials, and the best machinery at your side to help you create these products. This is why lean manufacturing is such a great process to use.