Running at full speed with Lean manufacturing

So many businesses place their priorities on innovation, discovering new ways of making money and potentially improving operations. However, company leaders and executives need to remember one of the biggest expenses that every organization has to deal with – time. Even more so than money, time is a limited resource. You can never earn back wasted time, and you have only 24 hours in a day to produce goods.

Lean manufacturing is one strategy businesses use to ensure their operations are always running at full speed and firing at all cylinders Lean philosophies stress the importance of efficiency, striving to reduce any wastes that cause companies to spend time on fruitless tasks.

“Downtime is tantamount to waste,” explains Manufacturing Business Technology magazine. “By first determining what that waste will cost, you can then determine appropriate measures for eliminating it. This is not an easy feat, which is why figuring out the cost of downtime is avoided altogether by many businesses.”

Putting a number value to wasted time is challenging, but some researchers have tried to do so. For example, a study conducted by Coleman Parkes Research in 2010 found that system outages alone can cost $196,000 annually, and that's only one source of downtime – faulty products, worker inefficiency, needless red tape and several other factors can lead to wasted time as well. According to Manufacturing Business Technology magazine, a single hour of wasted time costs some big manufacturers as much as $150,000.

Overcoming downtime with Lean

Clearly, downtime is something that businesses want to avoid at all costs, otherwise all the time spent on developing innovative products and improving other areas of the company will be for naught. Lean manufacturing can be used to solve this issue, ensuring manufacturing operations are running as smoothly as possible.

Lean philosophies place a huge emphasis on carefully planning every aspect of the manufacturing process so there is no wasted movement. This helps ensure employees are able to do their jobs in the quickest and most effective manner possible, and helps to greatly reduce any downtime. When there is no downtime, companies can at least be sure that they aren't throwing precious dollars away to the clock.