Basic Lean, Inc.’s Prerequisites for Success

Company Wide Understanding –

There must be a company-wide understanding of the basics of lean: what it means, why it is necessary, how it works.  You need to provide such an understanding to everyone, not just to manufacturing workers and managers.  To implement lean, a company needs active involvement from senior executives, staff and workers in all functional areas, including marketing, sales, accounting and finance, purchasing, materials, design, engineering, and manufacturing.

Workers and managers need to understand some basic system dynamics of manufacturing.  Specifically, they need to know how capacity planning, resource utilization and lot-sizing policies interact with each other and how they affect lead-time.  Without this, there will be no buy-in to the key techniques and policies of lean.  Support groups must also be included.

The lean transformation has to be implemented in both shop floor and office operations.  Office operations constitute a significant portion of the total lead-time for products, yet they are often overlooked as an opportunity for lead-time reduction.

Select the Model or Pilot Area –

Even though you should create company-wide lean education and awareness, top management should not attempt to reorganize the whole company for lean right away.  Instead, lean implementation should begin by focusing on a market segment where there is an opportunity via a quick response strategy, and a small part of the company should be reorganized using lead principles to serve this market.  In this way, by trying lean in one or two areas, management can minimize its risk and investment while it proves to itself and the rest of the company that this approach really works.   After absorbing the lessons from this experience, you can reorganize additional parts of the company for lean.

Develop the Strategies –

Concrete steps for implementing lean should be identified at the start of the initiative.  By building on lessons learned from implementing lean at dozens of companies, we are able to provide a road map for successful implementation.  It is important for management to review the entire map early, so that they buy into the whole plan.