Taking a true leader to run lean manufacturing

Lean manufacturing is one of the best ways in which you can cut costs and provide your customers with better products. Many businesses are turning to these manufacturing principles in order to ensure their customers will be able to have better products. For lean manufacturing to run correctly a good leader will need to be at the helm to make it work. The leader is responsible for exceeding the expectations of the customers by not only reducing the amount of mistakes and things that happen but also keeping the overall costs of the company lower.

The leadership qualities that need to be part of lean manufacturing come down to dedication, motivation, and inspiration as you need to change the way the company runs. The most popular methods of lean manufacturing comes with DMAIC. The DMAIC method stands for the following:

• Define


• Measures


• Analyze


• Improve


• Control

What does a leader need to do in order to properly implement DMAIC? They need to understand what each step entails and must be able to properly enact them within the organization. For the define phase the leader must review the project that they are working on and determine what type of financial benefits it will be able to provide to the organization. They must choose objectives for the team and then pitch them to the team in order to achieve the right objectives for the organization.

The measures are used simply to compare your inputs to your outputs. This is all about data collection in order to ensure that the organization will be able to move forward and actually make some type of progress. After you have the data collected you will then analyze it. Doing this will help you to see any potential problems that may arise and you are able to reduce any of these issues from actually happening.

Your company will then move onto improving all of the different things that may arise. You also need to create actual solutions that are part of the complete lean manufacturing process. Finally your last phase is the control phase which is where you have all of the training procedures and other things that make the entire company operate correctly.

The overall goal of DMAIC is to reduce the defects that occur with your products. The main number you want to reach is 3.4 defects per 1 million opportunities. By achieving this defect ratio you will be able to dramatically improve relationships with your customers. Fixing issues on the factory floor is not going to be easy but it is a great way to generate profits in the long run as you will be able to cut or eliminate problems.

As a leader you will need to rely on all of the knowledge you have pertaining to lean manufacturing and to start building upon the strengths you already have as a company. A manufacturing plant will have certain weaknesses but you will be able to improve them as you first seek out the strengths of the organization and work with your floor managers to find a way to fix these concerns.

To achieve the overall "good factory" standing it will end up taking time to implement everything. You may notice some immediate changes but in the long run you will start to deliver products in a timely manner without having a lot of defects to worry about.As you have everything working in an effective manner you won't have to worry about all the clean-up that occurs thanks to wasted raw goods and materials.By fixing the problems on the floors it improves processes with suppliers and delivery services.