Lean Disciplines and Techniques

The tools and techniques of operational excellence are available when you need them: aimed at upgrading the workplace and significantly improving quality, delivery and cost effectiveness and enabling a business to pull cost out of a business and convert it rapidly into cash. The following list is not exhaustive:

Quick Changeovers / SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Die) Here's a challenge: does any key item of equipment in your factory take more than 10 minutes to changeover, set up, 'make ready' or clean down between products? If so, why? SMED techniques are critical to any Lean programme: providing the flexibility we need to achieve service excellence and rapid throughput without excess inventory. In times of high demand they can also give us additional, capex free, capacity or reduce our dependence on sub-contractors.
Visual Management and Workplace Organisation (5S): Creating an 'obvious workplace' where organisational excellence is made self evident but also where any omissions, delays, problems and waste scream for attention.
Seven Statistical Tools: the standard seven simple problem solving tools (originally drafted by the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers) that help solve 98% of problems in business, help us learn the importance of variation in manufacturing and business processes and which lead us to pursue real and meaningful data in the cause of continual process improvement.
Taguchi techniques: Popularised by Japanese quality guru Genichi Taguchi but actually pioneered by British statistician Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher ninety years before. The approach is to use a mathematical model (orthogonal array) to enable optimised quality yield from complex processes with multiple variables. The skills can be taught to your staff and or our own experts can apply them to radically improve your process capability and performance.
Statistical Process Control (SPC) For those critical applications that can make or break our quality and delivery, SPC can often make a crucial contribution as well as enabling our work teams to truly understand and control their own processes.
Downstream Process /Internal Customer focus:Lean KPIs for production & support teams This rarely practiced discipline lies at the very heart of a truly Lean approach. For the few real Lean companies like, the business of treating the downstream process as the customer is far more than a slogan- it is a way of life; a daily habit practiced with a diligence that borders on fanaticism and affects every aspect of operations and performance management.
Level scheduling and workflow management There are a variety of approaches that can be deployed to fit your demand profile: even if your business is highly seasonable, subject to volatile and unpredictable demand shifts, unstable and changing orders or perilously short lead times. Forward Vision's sister organisations Coriolis and Keimis can also help provide a co-ordinated strategy for forecasting, planning and data management that can enable a robust and effective service capability.
Kanban Systems Simple and robust visual triggers that ensure that we achieve the downstream requirement without undue waste. Kanban disciplines come in a variety of forms: the best of them adapt themselves and exploit the product itself and the physical layout of the factory- using machines, space, stillages, racking to control and optimise workflow.
Cellular Manufacturing and One Piece Flow Disciplines The ideal batch quantity is one. One piece-flow disciplines reduce inventory, double-handling, throughput delays and over-manning, as well as limiting our exposure to quality problems. Where there are 'deep' processes involving a variety of process actions (especially combining machines with assembly, test, packing etc) flexible one-piece production cells can make a huge difference to our quality and delivery performance and to our costs.
QRQC (Quick Response Quality Control) & QRQC (Quick Response Quality Engineering) One of the hidden strengths of companies like Nissan and Toyota; how to make Continuous Improvement a daily habit and ritual by emphasising the internal customer ethos and instituting rapid performance feedback systems. Ensures problems, once solved, stay solved and creates the hunger for improvement. The hidden cement that often holds the more widely understood bricks together.