LEAN MANUFACTURING - Processes for eliminating waste and focusing on the customer

Process definition and mapping to ensure the uninterrupted flow of materials and products thorough the value stream. The maps are key to understanding how to improve the flow and find the bottlenecks that are causing delays and interruptions. This helps to clarify where pull production can increase throughput and synchronize the entire manufacturing processes.

Lean manufacturing requires producing only what is required for a sale, replacing building to plan. Every part of the production process needs to be triggered by demand only.

There a lot of obvious areas where processes must be analyzed, mapped into the total picture, streamlined and made best practices, and they include lead time reduction, set-up times, extreme schedule flexibility, electronic Kanban, Heijunka smoothing, and visual management systems, to name just a few.

Insight 1's production process development techniques, along with the lean leadership team of the company, combine to involve everyone, foster incredible teamwork and create a situation of peak performance.

But that's not enough, you have to build a system that is self sustaining by adding corrective action and audit systems to ensure that the process improvement becomes part of a living management system.

Without this element, most companies will fall back to their old way of doing "things" rather than really managing their processes.