Articles Tagged with ''lean manufacturing''

Successful Lean Six Sigma (LSS) deployment requires management leadership. Trained as LSS Champions, leaders sponsor and oversee projects, aligning them with strategic objectives and allocating resources.

If you run any manufacturing operation, you already know your most significant expense is your people. And we have all heard that people are also our greatest asset. So why do almost all of us put so little effort into setting them up for success? Here are the top three reasons to stop putting off standard work until tomorrow.

Visual cues represent a level one mistake-proofing device, or an intervention design or process that helps to prevent errors. In what ways does mistake proofing contribute to consistent defect reduction? Moreover, how does this technique facilitate confidence and a favorable user experience?

Organizations often celebrate faster lead times and lower defect rates but struggle to express these benefits in financial terms, leading to the undervaluation of continuous improvement efforts.

A quality auditor would be amazed if they saw your entire system from supplier to customer on one wall or in one big picture. Details and improvements are then easy to assess for planned actions. Quality stream mapping helps any organization.

Lean teaches us the importance of delivering value to the customer and emphasizes that companies must recognize their quality deliverables don’t end after the sales transaction is complete. In Lean, we define value from the customer’s perspective.

The Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) supports continuous improvement and Lean thinking. As a Virginia/DC U.S. Senate Productivity and Quality Award board member and a Baldrige examiner, I’ll discuss how the Baldrige Framework and AME Lean Sensei address manufacturing challenges, especially in workforce development.

This is only one of the possible reactions I could have had to this situation.

U.S. manufacturers are increasingly reshoring production in response to tariffs impacting global supply chains, viewing it as a long-term strategy to enhance quality and adapt to complexities.

In part 1, we explored the linkage of quality and lean. In this segment, we will discuss how quality and lean should be married together in product and process redesign and improvement.