Page 402 - Design for Six Sigma for Service (Six SIGMA Operational Methods)

362 Chapter Ten

Because of these problems, the company usually takes over 34 days to go
from raw material to delivery to customers. After identifying these
problems, the company redesigned the business process. The improved
process reduced most of the hidden transactions, and the company is now
able to move from raw material to delivery in five days.

10.5 Lean Operation Principles

Lean manufacturing is a very effective manufacturing strategy first
developed by Toyota. During a benchmarking study for the automobile
industry in the late 1990s (Womack, Jones, and Roos 1990), it was found
that Toyota clearly stood above its competitors around the world with the
ability it developed to efficiently design, manufacture, market, and service
the automobiles it produced. This ability made a significant contribution to
both the company’s profitability and growth as consumers found the
products to simultaneously exhibit both quality and value. The researchers
found that the focus on recognizing and eliminating wasteful actions and
utilizing a greater proportion of the company’s resources to add value for
the ultimate customer was the key to the operating philosophy. “Lean pro-
duction” is first mentioned in this study and is used to describe the efficient,
less wasteful production system developed by Toyota, called the Toyota
production system. Lean production in comparison to mass production was
shown to require one-half the time to develop new products, one-half the
engineering hours to design, one-half the factory hours to produce, and one-
half the investment in tools, facilities, and factory space (Monden 1993,
Ohno 1990, Shingo 1989).

Although the lean manufacturing approach was originally developed in the
traditional manufacturing industry, lean manufacturing mostly deals with
production systems from a process viewpoint, not a hardware viewpoint. It
has been found that most lean manufacturing principles can be readily
adopted in other types of processes, such as product development, office,
and service factory processes. When these lean manufacturing principles
are applied to nonmanufacturing processes, we call them lean operation
principles.

In process management practice, lean operation principles can be used to
analyze the current process and discover any problems in process design
and operation. Lean operation principles can also be used to guide the
process redesign and improvement.