Lean manufacturing spirit

According to its Japanese founders, 80% of lean manufacturing consists in creating an attitude that eliminates waste and maximises added value.

Lean manufacturing : It is essential to understand the contrast between added value and Muda.

Added value represents what your customer pays for, the act of assembling and manufacture. The rest, even if it is “work”, is Muda. Muda, or waste, is what your customer does not pay for, non-value-adding production.

As we shall see later, there are 7 Mudas.

Lean manufacturing leverage effect: Reduction of waste creates profit and cash-in-hand.

These additional financial resources can be assigned to more strategic objectives (research, marketing, sales, etc.) than the financing of stocks, in-process materials and oversized plants.

“Practical” Lean tools such as SMED, TQM, TPM, 5s are production tools designed to reduce Mudas in the Lean Manufacturing context. We shall see how the basics of Lean are based on “thinking small”: small plants, small spaces, small containers, small stocks, reduced in-process materials, production in small batches, small flexible lines, etc.