Lean Manufacturing Process Improvement

 

Use SIMUL8 to experiment with Lean techniques to improve efficiency

Introducing a Lean approach to a manufacturing process can have an immediate, positive impact on your efficiency and productivity. Typical results experienced by manufacturers include:

  • • Cost reductions of over 80%
  • • Increase in throughput of 40-80%
  • • Increase of productivity of 70-125%
  • • Reduce work in progress by over 80%

You can achieve these results by making changes like:

  • • Levelling Production to match demand
  • • Reducing end-to-end cycle time to less than customer’s expectation of reasonable wait time
  • • Using Just-in-Time delivery schedules with suppliers
  • • Monitoring quality in a responsive manner
  • • Properly (rather than quickly) fixing all problems at the source and accepting the higher short term cost of doing this
  • • Empowering and training employees to participate in continuous improvement and increasing communication and visibility to make this easy for them
  • • Reducing change over time so that batch sizes can be reduced cost effectively

All the above needs to be done together – it would be tough to achieve them individually. But most of them involve making decisions about a wide range of parameters (e.g. batch sizes, J-i-T schedules, acceptable cycles times, Kanban quantities, container sizes).

 

How do you get these parameters correct without playing a guessing game?

Simulations have long been used to train employees and create insights into how the benefits of Lean Manufacturing can be achieved, but those games don't allow quantification of exactly how a Lean process will behave. They create insights, and that is great, but it is not enough for making sure all the changes work in unison and actually deliver the benefits promised.

 

 

Discrete Event Simulation, like SIMUL8 simulation, does show accurately how a process will behave, both before and after implementing Lean. It means you can get the Lean implementation right-first-time.

 

What you get from using Discrete Event Simulation during and after a Lean implementation is:

  • • An accurate prediction of likely cost savings of introducing Lean to your manufacturing process
  • • A detailed understanding of exactly how the parameters impact overall performance
  • • The ability to test out any number of combinations of parameter values and decide the ones that are best for your implementation.
  • • Accurate predictions of the speed of response your customers will see
  • • A quick and easy-to-run device to obtaining buy-in from senior management or train employees
  • • A tool for empowering employees by allowing their process improvement ideas to be tested with easy to understand visual and numerical feedback on the idea’s effectiveness

 

Lean tutorial to analyze lead time, work in progress, and throughput in a Kanban system

 

Read Lean Improvement Case Studies:


Find out how Boston Scientific saved nearly $150,000 by identifying
bottlenecks in their processes with SIMUL8. Download the full case study

 

Read more Manufacturing Case Studies