How a lean practitioner think?

Thinking process of a lean practitioner will be explained in this article, in 4 steps. How a lean practitioner think for achieving lean manufacturing. Before discussing how a lean practitioner think, we shall discuss what is lean. In this article we will take manufacturing industry as example.

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What is lean manufacturing?

Lean manufacturing is a manufacturing process in which a product is produced, in such a way that, all its activity from order receipt from customer to payment receipt from the customer, is done in such a way that, only the exact customer requirement is met, not more or not less. Customer requirement is a very broad word, it includes technical specifications, price, lead time, after sales service, etc.

I think no more explanation is needed for lean manufacturing, since it’s very clear from above paragraph.

Now we shall discuss how a lean practitioner think.

How a lean practitioner think?

Suppose a lean practitioner sees an activity or anything in the manufacturing process.

1. In the first step he will try to eliminate the activity. For that he will ask the question to himself or others ‘why we should do this?’ If he gets a convincing answer, he will move to next step, if not, he will eliminate the activity.

2. In the next step he will try to reduce the contribution of resources and energy for that activity, for exactly matching customer requirement, without much investment. If this step is not possible, he will move to next step.

3. In this step he will try to rearrange or combine the activity, with respect to other activity, in such a way that contribution of resources and energy for that activity, will reduce. If this is not possible, he will move to next step.

4. Automation

I am concluding this article with an example. A glass half filled with water was kept on a table. A lean practitioner was passing next to that table and he was thinking, “why the glass is double the size to hold only this much of water?!”

Thank you for reading. Also please have a look at the article on thinking out of box and what is industrial engineering.

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