LEAN MANUFACTURING TO IMPROVE COMPETITIVENESS

The most popular solutions today to improve productivity and competitiveness are:

• replace labor with machines, which strongly rigidified production capacity and makes them dependent on complex skills, rare and expensive
• improve performance with logistic systems ever more sophisticated, with the risk that the computer will soon be the only one to understand what's happening on the flow of values
• "go lean"

In the past twenty years we have learned two things that everyone accepts without thinking about what they reveal:

• if many companies try to pass the lean, few do it successfully
• companies who pass through their transition to lean get spectacular results

In more specific manner, noting many experiences lean on a case by case basis, we can distinguish between two attitudes regarding continuous improvement:

• most companies that attempt to adapt the techniques of lean to their culture, in which lean is a program of change that comes after - and probably before - many others, such as Total Quality management, process reengineering, Six Sigma
• a few companies that rely on techniques for lean fundamentally questioning their methods of operation and evolve

The first obtain the results marginalized and abandoned their programs after a few lean years to run after a new management tool.

What can we learn from these few comments? That lean approach does not mean exogenous solution to the problems of enterprises.

What lean brings to us is a way to learn how to better manage in the current circumstances. The lean tools can better see and understand business problems, but they are the employees of the company who must deal with them, the lean can then capitalize on these resolutions.

An excellent example, which dates back to the origin of the lean, is provided by the kanban system. It was identified correctly by Shigeo Shingo, which stresses: "Some think that Toyota has offered a new dress very chic, kanban system, and then bought the same for the try. They quickly discover that they are far too big to wear it. They must eliminate waste and improve the substance of their production system before techniques such as kanban can help them."

A quarter century later, there are many "kanbans" tackles on production systems flow from classics - and whose operational are quite happy because the tool helps manage the daily movements of flow.

But who uses it? To do what? The kanban in the TPS (Toyota Production System), is explicitly a tool for kaizen. It uses the kanbans to allow kaizen, not the contrary. Indeed, the kanban is used to view the problems of specific delivery in supermarkets so that the operational:

• view their problems
• analyze
• learn to deliver their internal client surely with fewer stocks

Develop a kanban system without seeking these three objectives is to make an against-meaning mass on the success of continuous improvement at Toyota and among companies that succeed in using the lean. The results are invariably disappointing.

That is why the rules for the establishment of a kanban are:

• conduct a monthly review of the number of cards
• seek to minimize the margin of safety by kaizen
• kanban pick up the cards at least once per hour
• define special cards for hours of work exceptional

If these rules are not implemented, kanban is a management tool, but no improvement. It becomes such that if someone uses it as such! A hammer is only if the craftsman knows what he did.

In most venues we see the concern of officials is to "hold" kanban. They should rather be concerned to use the kanban every day to see the problems and every month to reduce inventories.

This, kanban analysis applies to all the tools of lean, SMED to the flat of stocks. As long as responsible of a zone has not decided to use the tool to improve its operating performance, and as long as it not used every day in this direction, putting in place the tools of lean merely replace one system with another, less responsible robust, it is therefore necessary to maintain the strength of the wrist and which always ends up being abandoned.

If it s not used for continuous improvement, lean is actually sub-optimal compared to traditional management tools.

It was only with continuous improvement that the advantage of lean is. "Skip to lean" will not automatically productivity or competitiveness, the same way as starting a training marathoner does not run 42 km in 2 hours. But if you want to attack the world record marathon, you need a serious training method.

The lean is not a set of solutions "secret" to the generic problem of competitiveness. It is a method of daily training to learn to be more efficient in the present context of the company. Nothing more, nothing less.