The Journey To Find Lean Success

Lean manufacturing is a process that many companies use to reduce or eliminate wastes and to improve the company. When you use lean you will be able to find out how to streamline your processes so you can have more control over what is being sent to the customers and the timeliness of your deliveries as well. Customers always have a certain level of expectation for products that they purchase. When a product fails to meet this expectation level, it doesn't do much to help the company's reputation as the customers won't come back for seconds and they are likely to spread the word about the infectiveness of your company or products.

Finding success with lean comes down to your commitment level and the way that you have introduced it to your staff. People will believe in what management can do as long as you are able to find ways to show them that the programs you are using will be effective. They will believe in it as long as you believe in it and you are committed to using it properly. Lean is a system that works but you need to have the commitment and discipline to make it work. Thousands of companies are using lean and they are able to find success with it. You need to become one of these companies!

Lean is like any other program in the fact that it takes time. Far too often people want too many things now and they don't take the time to really plan them out. You may waste money if you are not really working on becoming successful with the ways in which you plan out the process and stick to it. To make lean work you need to hire consultants to come in and deal with the training of the entire staff. Hiring consultants is a smart decision as these individuals come with experience and have just about every answer to questions that your employees may try to throw at them.

The lean consultants will come in and they will have all the correct principles that you need to train your staff. People that are properly trained will have confidence in themselves and in their abilities to do their job effectively. You need to really work on hiring a firm to come in and deal with the implementation phase. Then you will need to be able to focus on the maintenance phase and to make sure that everyone knows their role of lean and how to choose the right tools to help with their job duties. Lean is going to make things better for everyone, not just a few people in the company.

What makes lean nice is the fact that it can be pretty flexible. It has so many tools but each of the tools can be used for different things. You have people that can use the 5S method and others that use Kanban or Kaizen. The tools may be different but they can all work together to aid in preventing future problems and solving the issues that you do have right now.

Lean is a mindset change. Getting people to change their minds is not going to be easy by any means but you can do it with the right type of commitment and determination on your part. Employees need to be committed to lean for it to work right. They have to understand how it will aid in offering higher quality products to the customers and they need to be able to see the results of their hard work. It takes time for it to work and for you to see those results so you must be able to really work hard on keeping your staff motivated to lean when they are questioning if it is effective or not.