The Five Principles of Lean Thinking

How Lean Six Sigma Black Belts and Green Belts can use the Five Key Principles of Lean to drive efficiency into organizations.

Lean has five overriding Principles:

1. Identify your Customers and specify what “Value” means to them

In many organizations, the focus on efficiency, quality and cost improvements can be very much internal, detracting from what is actually important to the Customer.

All too often we make assumptions on behalf of our customers, because obtaining true “Voice of The Customer” can be both costly and time consuming.

2. Identify and map the Value Stream

The “Value Stream” is the visual depiction of all of the activities and processes within your organization that you use to Design, Procure, Produce and Deliver products and services to your customers.

Four Steps to completing a Value Stream Map are:

1. Identify the product or service you want to map. Take your biggest customer first and map the product or service you supply them

2. Draw the current state Value Stream Map

3. Draw the future state Value Stream Map

4. Develop and implement the Action Plan to bridge the gap between the current and future state value Streams

3. Make value creating steps happen in tight sequence so that the product or service “flows” smoothly to the Customer

Creating “Flow” within processes is about:
• Evenly distributing the time taken at each activity to eliminate bottlenecks and waiting time / delays. This is an activity known as “Line Balancing”

• Elimination of process delays and interruptions e.g, awaiting approval signatures, machine downtime etc

• Moving from “Batching” of work to “Single Piece Flow”

• Efficiently organizing your work area to ensure everything you need is at hand, when you need it, in the quantities required

• Producing your product or service Right First Time, every time, without the need for rework or inspection activities

There are various tools that can be employed to eliminate these wastes and improve flow within processes:
5S

Organising your workspace to reduce or eliminate Motion, Transport, Inventory, waiting and Rework due to defects

Plant Layout / Spaghetti Diagrams

A visual view of how a product or service moves between different workstations during processing.

SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Dies)

Is all about reducing the downtime associated with set-up and change-over of machinery, tooling and equipment
Jidoka

Automatic stopping of machinery / processes when a problem occurs or a production / transaction run is complete

4. Once “Flow” is introduced, respond to Customer “Pull” based upon Demand

Understanding the “Demand” is the first step in introducing flow.

Pull systems work on Kanban “Triggers” or “Signals”, Where the customer order will trigger a signal to production or service to fulfil that demand. This in turn triggers a signal to the supplier to replenish the process.

5. Pursue Perfection

Pursuing perfection is about continuously assessing your performance against your VOC ad working to eliminate waste to drive added value within the Value Stream.

Article Source: http://www.articledashboard.mk

Paul Martin is the author of this article on Six Sigma Training. Find more information about Black Belt Training here.

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