Managing Automation - February 2008 - (Page 17) [ COVER STORY] As manufacturers attempt to use lean techniques to streamline activities beyond the shop floor, they’re seeing that the task isn’t so easy and requires big cultural changes. BY JEFF MOAD 17 February 2008 Photo: Glowimages der Westhuizen, Matthew Barnett, David H. Lewis, Choicegraphx Photos: Duard van t’s a normal Wednesday afternoon, and your plant is humming along. Suddenly one of your managers receives a call from a key supplier: Due to an equipment failure, the supplier will be unable to deliver the parts you were counting on to complete next week’s orders. Does your organization quickly and efficiently respond to this event, launching a planned and documented series of actions, each the responsibility of an assigned owner? Or does the call provoke a sudden, chaotic fire drill, with supply managers stepping on one another, wasting effort and critical hours before finally coming up with a fix? Unfortunately, at far too many manufacturing companies, that scenario produces a chaotic and wasteful response. Though manufacturers have spent the past few years creating lean, repeatable processes within the production environment to respond quickly and efficiently to events such as changes in demand, many companies have not paid nearly as much attention to the processes that surround and feed the plant with materials, orders, new products, and critical information. Now, however, increasing numbers of progressive manufacturers are beginning to extend lean thinking, methodologies, and tools beyond the plant floor. They’re using lean tools and techniques to document and streamline business processes, reducing waste and eliminating costs in the supply chain, back office, new product development, and even sales and marketing. Many believe the payoff from applying lean to such non-production processes will far outdistance the gains achieved through lean on the plant floor. But, they warn, it won’t be easy. Applying lean to areas such as supply chain planning and sales and marketing will require a difficult cultural shift that some workers and managers may not be capable of making. And in the supply chain, in particular, lean requires a level of manufacturer-supplier collaboration that most have yet to achieve. On top of that, some tools that have been the bedrock of lean on the plant floor — such as value stream mapping and kanban — are proving more difficult to use or less relevant in non-production processes. “Lean breeds relatively well in the captivity of the plant floor where you have repeatable processes and it’s easier to visualize what’s going on all the time,” says Bob Parker, research vice president at IDC Manufacturing Insights. “Outside of the production environment, it requires some retooling.” Over the past 18 years, since the publication of James P. Womack’s seminal book on Toyota’s Lean Production System, The Machine That Changed the World, lean thinking has become widely adopted on the plant floor. In a recent survey of 308 manufacturing companies by Aberdeen Group, 90% said they have implemented lean on the
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