Why it is important to teach lean manufacturing principles to your employees

Lean manufacturing is an initiative that focuses on cost reduction and increases in turnover by constantly and methodically eliminating activities that do not add value to the manufacturing process. Basically what lean manufacturing does is help companies to achieve targeted productivity, as well as other things, by introducing tools and techniques that are easy to apply and maintain. What these tools and techniques are doing is reducing and eliminating waste, things that are not needed in the manufacturing process.

One thing that is really important to know about lean manufacturing is how you should actually go about introducing it to your company. The reason for this is that different manufacturing techniques require different skills and techniques that you should use when converting to that style and lean manufacturing is no different. So before deciding to switch over to lean manufacturing you should take a moment to review some of these important factors.

In fact when it comes to lean manufacturing it is actually really important that you teach your workforce the principles behind lean manufacturing. The reason why it is so important to teach your employees about the principles of lean manufacturing is that even though lean manufacturing is not hard to implement if your employees are unaware of the basic principles they are not going to be able to successful switch over to lean manufacturing. And if your employees fail to switch over to lean manufacturing then all of that hard work you have put in will have been wasted. Basically what this means is that if you don't prepare your employees by teaching them the basic principles you are increasing your chances of failing at lean manufacturing.

But with lean manufacturing there are some things that you are going to want to keep in mind when you are teaching your employees about the basic principles of lean manufacturing. Here are some basic principles that you should teach your employees about lean manufacturing.

Number one:
The first thing that you need to be aware of is that unlike other manufacturing styles with lean manufacturing you are not going to want to train your entire workforce at the same time. What you are going to want to do is to get your upper management onboard and then choose a handful of people from the different departments. And then you are going to want to choose an area that is small and begin to introduce lean manufacturing to that one area. Keep in mind that when choosing an area you are going to also want to choose an area that will give you results rather quickly so that you can show your employees the good things that can happen by converting to lean manufacturing.

Number two:
Visual controls are a vital part of lean manufacturing is because it provides the company with the ability to manage variances in process conditions and in product outcomes at the source of where the product is being made, not to mention it is used at the same time that the product is being made. Basically visual controls are going to allow you to respond faster to problems, but they are also going to allow you to develop through countermeasures to problems and by doing this your company is going to be able to achieve numerous things.

Number three:
One thing that you need to teach your employees about is down time. This doesn't mean that you need to give your employees down time in fact it actually means just the opposite. Many times during the manufacturing process there is down time when machines need to get moved or something else happens and most of the time people sit around talking and relaxing which allows your company to lose money. So what you need to do is to give your employees other work to do during those down times, such as cleaning up the work area or something similar.