Archive for October, 2010
Lean Manufacturing – Improving Process Effectiveness By Reducing Wastes
Its origin:
Lean Manufacturing is a set of practices which aims at making a manufacturing process of a company cost-effective and improves customer satisfaction by enabling it to achieve faster delivery times. Lean Manufacturing has had a complete evolvement journey to its name, starting from the 19th century till date. It has gone through various stages of design and development, the most prominent one being Toyota’s Lean Integration to their manufacturing processes.
How does it achieve this?
Reduce Waste – Use Recycling Trash Cans
For carrying out waste reduction successfully, it is essential to use recycling trash cans. A few methods of disposing waste are-landfill, incineration, and recycling. Landfill is the oldest method of disposing waste which involves burying of waste material at the landfill site. The air and water contamination caused by a landfill poses serious threat to health of the people living in the distance of three to five miles from it. A recycle bin will help everyone to think differently.
Incineration on the other hand is a process of converting the waste materials into ash, flue gases, and particulates by combustion. The volume of the original waste is reduced by 95-96% by incineration, and it is also beneficial for treatment of clinical wastes and hazardous wastes. The amount of waste material going to a landfill is reduced significantly by incineration. For incineration, proper waste disposal is necessary by both residential communities and commercial areas. Trash cans and recycling containers play a key role in collection of waste materials and removing non-combustible materials from the waste.
Lean Six Sigma Explored – Reducing Wastes, Increasing Profits
Unlike traditional Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma utilizes the DMAIC method. This stands for define, measure, analyze, improve, and control. These steps will help businesses to reduce and/or eliminate wastes within their processes, thereby improving performance, customer satisfaction, and profits. Utilizing these five phases allows those who embark on Lean Projects to have a clear definition of what they are trying to achieve, how they’re going to achieve it, and the path that their business needs to take to arrive at success. The ultimate goal of any Lean Six Sigma project is to reduce or eliminate waste, and utilizing these phases is the path to achieving that goal.
While typical projects will generally focus on finding problems and creating solutions, the lean process focuses on finding and eliminating any wastes in the way of resources, employees, steps, products, processes, and other business elements. The theory is that when you reduce or eliminate wastes, you are able to make processes much more efficient and productive than they might have been otherwise. This is the basic foundation for the successful implementation of Lean Six Sigma. Without this foundation, the entire process will crumble and fall, much like a house that is built from the ground up without its own foundation.