Lean Tools

Lean Tools

Abstract

Due to its source, lean has mostly been broadly directed to manufacturing concentrated businesses, particularly in automotive and aerospace industries. With some pre-planning and industry-specific concerns, these identical tools and notions can furthermore be directed in other enterprises as well.

All management schemes use exact tools and methods to complete their objectives. For demonstration, Pareto investigation, fishbone design drawings, and method command journals are all absolutely crucial tools of a total quality management system. Some practitioners contend that lean can be characterised by a set of procedures and practices.

Lean Tools

Introduction

Lean Thinking has its origins in the Toyota Production System since 1950s. Womack, et al (1990) were probably the first to use this term in their seminal piece of work “The machine that changed the world”. Lean Thinking is a set of principles that redefines the way the organization thinks about waste, value, quality and efficiency. It leads the organization on a path of continuous improvement by relentlessly driving waste out of the operation.

Michael Porter in his work on The Competitive Advantage of the Nations (1980) had identified three generic strategies to be followed by a company. They are cost leadership, differentiation and focus. There was an implicit assumption in the porter's model that a company can adopt only one of these strategies in the long term. Lean Thinking runs contrary to this and shows the way to achieve cost leadership, enhanced customer value and increased quality of product and services. With the application of Lean Thinking, organization creates a niche for itself through flexible operations, differentiates itself by offering only those product and services that customer needs and achieves cost leadership by reducing all forms of muda - the Japanese term for waste.

Thus, while removing muda or waste from the process, system, organization is one side of the coin, adding value is another side of the same coin. In other words, Lean Thinking and its principles help organization to uncover the muda in its operations and convert the muda into value from the customer point of view. With lean thinking it is possible to do / achieve more and more with less and less of resources, effort and time; within the context of the customer requirements.

 

Lean tools

In this paper I am going to talk about most significant tools and talk about about their benefits and their limitations.  These tools are:

Just-in-time

Total Productive Maintenance

Theory of constraints

 

Just-in-time

Many of today's widespread managerial concepts have been introduced and treated as new-to-the-world. However, this is mostly due to ignorance or a need of knowledge. Despite the detail that the built up information on the subject in publications is very often tremendous, for some causes it is often either disregarded or hidden. Sometimes, these notions have been very powerfully encouraged by enterprise persons, advisors, advisor bureaus and so on. Unfortunately, the factual source of managerial notions is seldom revealed.

There have appeared diverse managerial notions at distinct times in the past and new ones are certain to appear in the ...