Reflection On The Continuous Process Improvement And LEAN

Lean manufacturing is the production of goods using less of everything than in mass production: less human effort, less manufacturing space, less investment tools and less engineering time to develop a new product. A company becomes lean by continuously increasing its capacity to produce high-quality goods while simultaneously decreasing

“Lean is a systematic approach to identifying and eliminating waste (non-value-added activities) through continuous improvement by flowing the **product at the pull of the customer in pursuit of perfection.” Lockwood [24].

Lean maximizes throughout by reducing waste. It started out in manufacturing and production, and later branched out to be adopted in other areas. It is increasingly being deployed in startups, and in strategy analysis.

Lean operations emphasizes the understanding of the customer by producing units only as they are needed. As individual units are manufactured this reduces inventory drastically. This also would reduce any waste of products created and not sold. Both of these processes would have been a benefit to my company as there were several units of certain brands that were not desirable or meeting customer needs. This caused a loss of revenue by having units that were produced but not sold. The lean operations and Just In Time methods would eliminate this problem from the manufacturing side of my company.

1. Review the Continuous Improvement Cycle (PDCA) discussed on pages 140-141 of the Kelly text. Provide an example of an application of this process to your own organization, either how it is applied, or what an application might look like. Be sure to include a discussion of the challenges to implementing this approach, as well as what the benefits would be.

The lean philosophy centers on the elimination of waste in all forms in an organisation (Shpak, 2016). Lean is usually implemented by initially

For this discussion board assignment I have chosen to further research the key term of continuous improvement. My main reason for wanting to do further research into this topic is out of a general curiosity and interest of mine as well as how it is relevant to my current job. Ever since learning about the Toyota Production System (TPS) and lean manufacturing a year ago while taking another class at Liberty University, I have been continuing to learn as much as I can about it. I think that lean manufacturing is so interesting and has a lot of value for manufacturing as well as many other fields and even in my daily life. Continuous improvement is a big part of lean manufacturing, so that is why I chose to write about this topic.

Lean manufacturing is the production of goods using less of everything than in mass production: less human effort, less manufacturing space, less investment tools and less engineering time to develop a new product. A company becomes lean by continuously increasing its capacity to produce high-quality goods while

“Lean means creating more value for customers with less” (Krejewski, L., Ritzman, L.P., & Malhotra, M.K., 2013). Implementing this into a project can make the project very successful at a lower rate of cost and time. There are five steps in allowing the lean process to work successfully. This process is easy to remember but not always easy to achieve. Specifying the value from the customer’s point of view of the product that the customer is interested in purchasing is the first step. Identifying all the steps of value for the product the customer wants to purchase and eliminating the steps that are unnecessary is the second step. Creating a sequence of steps that flow in a consistent fashion and will flow smoothly toward the customer is the third step. Introducing the flow of the product that the customer is interested in purchasing and allowing the customer to pull value from the product is the fourth step. The fifth and final step in the lean technique process is “as value is specified, value streams are identified, wasted steps are removed, and flow and pull are introduced, begin the process again and continue it until a state of perfection is reached in which perfect value is created with no waste” (Lean Enterprises Institute, 2015).

This approach consists of Lean Thinking and Six Sigma, which are two processes that are currently famous in the health industry. Their popularity in this industry originates from the fact that they both provide a systematic manner to promote incremental process innovations. While they are mostly used in administration and service areas, Lean Thinking and Six Sigma have undergone parallel developments in the recent years (de Koning et. al, p. 4).

The application and implementation of lean principles or thinking is a process that requires commitment from every stakeholder in the organization. This process entails commitment to the organization's workers and to the system itself in order to make changes towards improvement. Generally, the implementation of lean thinking is geared towards continuous improvement through the elimination of waste. However, lean management or implementation of the principles sometimes incorporate mistakes that are made by leaders in the execution process. This is mainly because lean leadership appears to be simple though its complex because of the costs associated with it. The mistakes usually occur because of intrinsic complexities of exploring deeply into organizational philosophies, business strategy, psychology, and macroeconomics.

In an effort to eliminate waste and maintain competitive advantages, GM introduced lean manufacturing by

Lean is defines the manufacturing philosophy that reduces the time between the shipping and customer demand, which based on the systematic method by eliminating waste, that means giving the customer what they want when they want it, and don 't waste whatever. Rahmana, Sharif and Esa (2013) suggested lean production is mentioned to improve the company 's performance from the philosophy in reducing waste in order. That means, lean system destination is the decrease cost by removing the non-value activities, which they are applying a category of tools and techniques for checking and eliminating defective in the production process. In the Evenort Company should emulate the five overriding principles of lean thinking in terms of implementing lean that there is guarantee the company has been driving correctly in the lean manufacturing (Cardiff 2015) as can show in table 1.

However, Chase et al (1998) identified lean themes as total visibility; respect for people; flexibility; continuous improvement (kaizen); synchronisation and balance; responsibility for the environment and a holistic approach. These two are similar as one must have respect for people while specifying value by putting their needs into consideration, the value stream needs to be identified and made to flow continuously and this can be achieved through synchronisation and balancing, the pull system depicts the flexibility approach and lastly both emphasize continuous improvement.

Lean is a process where creating more value to customers by minimizing wastage, time with less resources. Lean organization understand the customer value and try to increase proceed which adding more value to the business. In order to accomplish the lean thinking