How Does Lean Manufacturing Help Small Manufacturers?

How Does Lean Manufacturing Help Small Manufacturers?

The answer is Yes!! Whether you are a company with 10 employees or one with 1000 lean manufacturing principles help in the growth of the company. Lean Manufacturing helps the manufacturer in providing higher value to the customer and at the same time to cut down on waste from every department of the manufacturing company. Value generation activity is promoted with the help of lean manufacturing whereas non-value activities are cut down.

Let’s look at how the lean manufacturing process helps the manufacturer

• There can be movement of raw materials over longer distances which places strain on the finances of the company. You can reduce this by making value stream map and optimal layout for the plant floor. You can also avoid long supply chains by moving the raw materials closer to the plant.

• Major disadvantages of having a higher inventory includes working capital getting tied up, space getting misused. Lean Manufacturing help the manufacturer by maintaining a continuous flow of production, getting the raw materials only when needed, elimination of overproduction.

• Waiting has a negative impact on the manufacturer’s operations like waiting for raw materials, or for instructions from the manager, waiting for the process to get complete, or a breakdown to be fixed. Continuous flow techniques and standard work instruction can ensure time consistency and method for the production step.

• Overproduction can lead to several issues like the misuse of resources and wastage of space, this can be reduced by matching the production to the demands of consumers, pull manufacturing techniques and manufacturing in smaller quantities.

• Performing the unnecessary tasks that are not given a high priority by the customer and implementation of the standard operating procedures that can be customized to meet different customer demands can save time and cost.

• Defects can be caused by many reasons like usage of substandard raw materials, wrong operations at the assemblage, poor equipment and poor training. Hidden costs like the rework, reschedulement, lead times and setup. Some of the solutions would include allowing the operators to look into issues immediately, implementation of error protection, identification of root causes, and standard operating procedures.

• Accurate data also goes long way in identifying where the projects are stuck and have to be looked into.

Lean Manufacturing can be implemented with the help of SAP Business One, which is an ERP software for Small and Medium Enterprises (SME), it helps in the simplification of the processes and streamlining of operations.