The traditional approach to repetitive manufacturing is to divide the process into multiple departments, one for each process operation, and to dedicate machinery, equipment, and, above all, personnel to each department. Often, each department has its own management manager, perhaps with a dedicated support structure.
The initial result of this approach is a sort of "segregation" of employees into watertight compartments, resulting in a strong specialization of each employee on a single operation. Leaving aside the alienation and frustration that such an organization generates among company personnel, one of the most harmful consequences is a lack of overall vision of the process: everyone knows a slice of it, but few understand the whole.
In such a system, it is always necessary to create production planning for each individual work centre, typically based on sales forecasts (in the case of forecast-based production) or on orders (make-to-order approach). This scheduling activity (manual or using MRP) is very expensive and complex to manage, requiring multiple picking and placing records between different inter-operational warehouses, and is always designed to utilize 100% of the theoretical capacity of all work centres. It requires strong daily involvement of production managers in progress monitoring and inventory management, both because the surrounding conditions (such as internal process efficiency and market demand) change very rapidly, and because traditional MRP systems are often not designed to optimize semi-finished product inventory.
Lean Thinking emphasizes the importance of continuous (i.e., without interruptions between operations) and rapid (i.e., with rapid throughput) flow. The fragmented vision of traditional organization is replaced with a process-based organization that emphasizes the integration of operations to ensure fluidity and continuity in the sequence of decisions and operations.
Hence the need to implement organizational solutions that provide visibility and coherence to the entire business process, redesigning the layout and organization of work with a view to physical or virtual product lines (in accordance with the Kanban methodology).
This approach significantly simplifies the need for planning, reducing it to the bare minimum, in the knowledge that "any planning or forecasting is wrong by definition." Clearly identifying the slowest operation in the process (the bottleneck) allows production managers to focus almost exclusively on that operation, accepting that other work centres may be inactive at certain times. Appropriately setting inter-operational buffers, combined with visual management based on Kanban concepts, allows for automatic balancing of production progress based on actual customer demand.
Value Stream Mapping is the methodological tool for graphically visualizing the value chain of a given process, highlighting areas of inefficiency, and redesigning it with a view to continuous flow. This shifts from a push-type production system to a pull-type system, in which production of the entire product line is driven by the end customer's actual consumption of the finished product. Visual management using kanban or—in more complex cases—an electronic signal (known as electronic kanban) controls and self-balances the flow.
Redesigning production flows allows for reductions in process lead times, inventory levels, and customer lead times of up to 90% compared to pre-processing values. The resulting benefits are:
ü Greater operational flexibility, meaning faster customer responses;
ü Improved productivity of resources employed, such as labour rather than financial resources or tangible assets;
ü Reduction of fixed assets and obsolescence risks;
ü Timely measurement of the profitability and efficiency of each product line, with the ability to adjust short- to medium-term industrial and commercial policies as well as long-term strategies;
ü Simplification of the organizational structure by reducing the number of hierarchical levels;
ü Greater employee satisfaction and motivation, with a heightened sense of belonging.
Elite engineers can help client companies to understand the basics of processes re-engineering and to critically review their value chain, to reorganize material and information flows, and to optimize production layouts.
