How to get "Better Through Lean" in only 10 minutes

Discover how advanced your company is in becoming a Lean organisation by taking our 10 minute “Better Through Lean™” assessment.

The core idea of Lean Manufacturing is to maximise customer value while minimising waste. Simply, Getting better through Lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources.

A Lean organisation understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste.

To accomplish this, Lean thinking changes the focus of management from optimising separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments to optimising the flow of products and services through entire value streams that flow horizontally across technologies, assets, and departments to customers.

To begin your Better Through Lean assessment, go to: www.betterthroughlean.com

The Transferral of Lean from Manufacturing to Construction: a case study

Lean Construction worked for CivilPlus resulting in a transformation at Townsville-based business that was proof that Lean Manufacturing principles do not just help manufacturers – they can assist construction companies, too.

After completing a range of Lean Manufacturing programs, the civil construction company went on to successfully introduce 5S housekeeping in its workshops and onsite trailers.

Even before it was introduced to Lean Manufacturing (or Lean Construction) principles, CivilPlus was close to world class standard.

Director Scott Ironside and co-director Richard Lamb, both of whom are Townsville born and bred, established CivilPlus in 2004. “We have gone from three employees to 45 in nine years,” Ironside said. The company operates from two 400m2 workshops in the Townsville suburb of Garbutt and has six trailers that go to project sites.

CivilPlus provides civil and marine infrastructure services, such as pipeline installation; pavement, dam and bridge works; and marine construction, including pontoons and wharfs. The company’s projects are valued from $20,000 to $10 million, and most clients are within a 400km radius of Townsville.

CivilPlus was first introduced to Lean Manufacturing through the Queensland Nickel Supply Chain Project, which was developed in 2010 to help Yabulu Refinery operator Queensland Nickel Pty Ltd increase its supply chain’s responsiveness and capabilities.

Twenty manufacturers, including CivilPlus, participated in various stages of the project, which identified the main inhibitors to supply chain performance and how to overcome them.

“We landed a couple of big jobs while we took part in the supply chain project, so it was worthwhile working with QMI Solutions,” Ironside said. The company had just relocated its premises, so it was a good opportunity to make improvements.

Click here to read the full story

Use Lean to take the waste away

It is still a little surprising to me when I read about companies just discovering the benefits of Lean Manufacturing. The concept has been around for quite some time (it was originally termed "Lean" by the LEI in the late 1980s) and it is even permeating into other sectors such a Health, Finance and Administration. In fact, any business that has a process of some sort (every business?) can benefit from Lean.

In brief, Lean is the reduction of waste in all its forms. And while the traditional Seven Wastes has been expanded to include Eight or Nine Wastes, Lean essentially aims to reduce the following wastes:  

1. Over production
2. Waiting
3. Transportation
4. Inventory
5. Motion
6. Over processing
7. Defective Units

Click here for more details about what these mean and how they negatively affect your business.

Two important things to remember here. Where Lean Manufacturing fails is when companies have approached it as a one-off event - it should be treated as a continuous improvement program and there are tools you can use to ensure Lean is implementable and sustainable in your organisation. Second, it's success should be measured as a cultural change above all else. It is fine to see productivity rise and that's ultimately what everyone wants, but when staff buy into the Lean mentality and it is part of the culture, you know you have been successful and will be in the long term.

The Lean tools I mentioned before are outlined in our ProEdge Manufacturing Excellence program, which has been scheduled for this year - the next one is in Mackay, Queensland on 19th February.

Lean Manufacturing gets results too. Read some of our recent success stories of companies that have implemented Lean well (click on the business name to read the full case study):

Austchrome:

• reduced job turnaround times from 30 to 17 days
• increased production volume by 50%

Before and after Lean at Austchrome

Townsville Pallet and Crate:

• 100% delivery in full, on time

Brisbane Tray Bodys:

• increased productivity by 100%
• increased productivity wins mining client

There is a whole new blog topic where you can relate the principles of Lean to those espoused by sustainability advocates, but for now, just know that Lean works, it's scalable and your competitors are probably already doing it.

The poetry of waste

One of our clients penned the following poem about waste in their work environment:

Manufacturing is all about production

but too many and then there is more reduction

As time is lost on extra widgets

the warehouse manager will get the fidgets

Inventory is always great,

but not when you have to wait and wait.

So do not polish and do not shine,

if it is a waste of time.

Wasted time and loss of space

When we try to do with haste

So make a plan and think it through

otherwise you will make a blue

Touch it once and this is great

Touch it thrice and you need advice

Sometimes the waste is beyond our reach

but QMI Solutions can fill the breach

Many thanks to Radmila Bowman at Playhard Sports for the contribution.

No-waste circular economy is good business – ask China

From The New Scientist...

Don't throw out that broken toaster: it's key to our prosperity. Redesigning the economy so that all waste is reused or recycled would be good for business, according to two new reports.

For centuries the global economy has been linear. Companies extract resources from the environment, turn them into products and sell them to consumers – who eventually throw them out. As a result we are burning through Earth's natural resources and wasting useful materials.

But it doesn't have to be that way, says Felix Preston of think tank Chatham House in London. Instead, we could have a circular economy in which waste from one product is used in another.

Click here to read the full article.

Lean leadership lessons from General Colin Powell - Problems are gold

A great post from Lean Pathways.

General Colin Powell says of leadership:

“The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.”

In the article referred to by author Al Norval, General Powell goes on to say that in his opinion, given this test, the majority of CEOs would fail.

Norval makes a comparison between Powell and Lean's Mental Models:

"Problems are Gold, buried treasure to be unearthed. But in all too many organisations, problems aren’t treated as gold, rather they are treated as things to be swept under the carpet and left alone. People learn quickly to stop bringing problems to leaders. The funny thing is - the problems still exist."

Click here to read the full article.

The Principles of Lean Innovation

We've been operating in the Lean Manufacturing sphere for over ten years and during that time we've seen Lean methodologies permeate beyond operational implementation in manufacturing environments to be applied in sales, healthcare, finance and administration.

We believe that Lean itself is a form of innovation where managers can make the most out of existing resources, but below is a post on Lean innovation, which applies Lean thinking to the innovation process.

Click here to read the post - or contact us about Lean implementation.

Process innovation gets APA off to a flying start

While benefits from process improvements are their own reward, it is tempting to sit back and think the job is now done. Asia Pacific Aerospace introduced a suite of Lean Manufacturing principles with tangible benefits including; improved turnaround times of 12% and increased capacity, but importantly they recognised the continuous improvement journey isn't over yet - in fact it is never over.

Click here to read the full article. 

Food for Thought - Transforming avocado/mango production with process innovation

Knowing that productivity can be improved is one thing, but where to start is another.

Based on the findings of a process benchmark tool, Simpson Farms identified areas for improvement within their manufacturing processes, enabling the reduction of lead times by 15% and increasing productivity by 10%.

Within a year, Simpson Farms implemented a range of process improvement tools such as Value Stream Mapping, Visual Performance Measurement, 5S, Leading & Managing Change and Standardised Work.

Click here to read the full article.

For Toyota, Patriotism and Profits May Not Mix

This is a great and insightful article from the Wall Street Journal reporting on Toyota's overcapacity, desire to protect Japanese jobs, the importance of 'monozukuri' (manufacturing skills), export reliance, possible off-shoring to North America and losing $5 billion a year.

Click here to read the full article.

Better process means better innovation

This excerpt is part of a larger post by Dr Tim Kastelle from UQ.

It is from Chess Champion Gary Kasparov commenting on the winners from a 2005 Chess tournament which allowed human and computers to enter as hybrid teams. The winners were amateur players using modest equipment with a superior process. He said:

"Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process."

Click here to read the full article.

Roma company sharpens up for CSG work

After learning of the assistance available to manufacturers through QMI Solutions, Sharpe Engineering first used the QMI team to conduct a Benchmark exercise, then an enterprise resource planning (ERP) selection process and, most recently, to implement the 5S system. “We knew what we had to do to improve the business, but QMI Solutions prompted it,” says CEO Peter Sharpe.

As a result, Sharpe Engineering benefited by increasing its business by 50% and selected an ERP system specific to the business's needs.

Click here to read the full article.

The value of programs supporting manufacturing SMEs

Released in September by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation is a research report into the effectiveness of various Government programs from around the world that support manufacturing SMEs.

Programs from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, Korea, Spain, and the UK and USA are analysed to determine effectiveness and return on investment for governments. NB: Enterprise Connect is the program analysed on behalf of Australia.

The report is quite extensive but in essence it comes to the conclusion that SME manufacturing support programs need to explicitly respond to the specific current challenges, needs, skills, and capabilities of a country’s SME manufacturing base, while at the same time charting a path to help SME manufacturers acquire the next generation of engineering, innovation, and product development and commercialisation skills.

Because SME manufacturers have to continually adapt to a changing landscape, the report argues that support programs must be as responsive. It suggests that analysing the composition of a nation’s manufacturing base, in terms of the "technological intensity" of its manufacturing sectors as either "low-technology", "medium-low technology", "medium-high technology", or "high-technology" is one way to do this.

When comparing Anglo-American programs with those of Germany/Japan, it is possible that German and Japanese SME manufacturers may be enjoying the benefits of the more advanced technical and engineering apprenticeship training programs these countries are renowned for (particularly Germany’s famed Technische Hochschules), meaning that their SME manufacturing support efforts have historically been able to focus more on the "front-end" of innovation, R&D, and new product development and introduction, instead of having to invest as much effort in assisting manufacturers with adopting lean manufacturing principles, improving process techniques, and adopting new technologies.
Click here to download a PDF of the full report.

Redmond Gary Elevates its Performance

Redmond Gary initially worked with QMI Solutions for six months, focusing specifically on introducing Lean Manufacturing practices. “We did a benchmarking exercise to see where the business sat compared to the rest of the industry,” says Managing Director Andrew Danks.

Profitability increased by 20%, productivity by 25%, production has risen from three vehicles a month to one a week and the accident rate has significantly reduced.
Click here to read the full article.