Essential Lean Manufacturing for Management Consultants

What is the aim of this course?    This course will help you drastically improve your knowledge and skills in optimizing the production, and operations of any company through a series of practical cases. It is designed for people who want to become consultants, or business analysts, or have to run and optimize production on a daily basis. In the course you will learn 3 things:   

1. How to understand any production or operational activities  

2. How to optimize the production and operations in order to get more things done, cheaper at higher quality with fewer resources using elements from lean manufacturing, theory constraints

3. Where to look for savings and improvements, how to calculate potential savings in Excel and implement them

I will concentrate here on lean manufacturing techniques as well as things related to the theory of constraints (removing bottlenecks and critical chains).   

This course is based on my 15 years of experience as a consultant in top consulting firms and as a Board Member responsible for strategy, performance improvement, and turn-arounds in the biggest firms from Retail, FMCG, SMG, B2B, and services sectors that I worked for. I have carried out or supervised over 90 different performance improvement projects in different industries that generated a total of 2 billion in additional EBITDA. On the basis of what you will find in this course, I have trained in person over 100 consultants, business analysts, and managers who now are Partners in PE and VC funds, Investment Directors and Business Analysts in PE and VC, Operational Directors, COO, CRO, CEO, Directors in Consulting Companies, Board Members, etc. On top of that my courses on Udemy were already taken by more than 181 000 students including people working in EY, Walmart, Booz Allen Hamilton, Adidas, Naspers, Alvarez & Marsal, PwC, Dell, Walgreens, Orange, and many others.

I teach through case studies, so you will have a lot of lectures showing examples of analyses, and tools that we use. To every lecture, you will find attached (in additional resources) the Excels as well as additional presentations, and materials shown in the lectures so as a part of this course you will also get a library of ready-made analyses that can, with certain modifications, be applied by you or your team in your work.  

Why have I decided to create this course?   

Most consultants and business analysts are terrible at organizing operational issues. They treat the operations, especially production, as a black box and try to avoid it at any cost. Technical things overwhelm them and they shy away from them. This approach is not the right one as you find elements that resemble production everywhere. In hospitals, most procedures performed are very similar to production issues. The same goes for running a call center, a chain of restaurants, a logistics company, or a firm delivering specialized services. Everywhere you have operations that you can optimize by using techniques that I will show in this course.  Production influences heavily other areas especially sales and marketing. Therefore, it is a good idea to have at least a general knowledge of production. The funny thing is that to be good at production you do not even have to be technical at all. I have not finished any technical school and I am pretty good at finding significant improvements in production. One of the best Production Directors I know has finished Pedagogical Studies.   

To sum it up, I believe that if you want to build or to find improvements in any business you should master techniques related to optimizing production. That is why I highly recommend this course not only to consultants or business analysts that have to advise their customers but also to owners, founders of businesses as well as production directors.   

In what way will you benefit from this course?   

The course is a practical, step-by-step guide loaded with tons of analyses, tricks, and hints that will significantly improve the speed with which you find and analyze production. There is little theory – mainly examples, a lot of tips from my own experience as well as other notable examples worth mentioning. Our intention is that thanks to the course you will know:   

1. How to understand the production   

2. How to optimize it   

3. Where to look for savings and improvement in production   

4. How to calculate the impact of proposed changes in Excel   

You can also ask me any question either through the discussion mode or by messaging me directly.   

How the course is organized?   

The course is divided currently into the following sections:   

• Introduction. We begin with a little intro into the course as well as some general info on production   

• Basic methods of improving production. In the second section, I will discuss the basic techniques that you can use to optimize your business. Here you will find the potential low-hanging fruits. Here I will show you basic lean manufacturing methods as well as elements of the theory of constraints. You will also see how to calculate potential savings in Excel   

• Continuous Flow. The ideal in production is the so-called continuous flow in which production goes smoothly and fast. Products are being produced fast and cheaply. In this section, I will tell you how to achieve it. This is one of the pivotal elements of lean manufacturing   

• Advanced methods of improving production. In this section, I will continue with the more advanced ways in which you can improve your production such as SMED, TPM, Automation, Critical Chain   

• Capacity management. Apart from optimizing the production you have to think strategically and know when you have to add a new capacity/factory. In this section, I will show you how you can do that   

• Production planning. Production planning is the brain of production. If you get this wrong the other things won’t matter. In this section, I will show you some ways in which you can analyze and improve production planning   

• A case study in Optimization of in-store processes using Lean Manufacturing. In this section, I will show you how you can use lean manufacturing techniques to optimize processes in stores.

You will be able also to download many additional resources   

1. Excels with analyses shown in the course   

2. Presentation of slides shown in the course   

3. Links to additional presentations and movies    

4. Links to books worth reading

At the end of my course, students will be able to…

• Analyze production process

• Improve production process – make it faster, cheaper, and at higher quality

• Calculate in Excel the potential impact of proposed changes

• Apply improvement techniques to other fields and industries

Who should take this course? Who should not?

• Consultants

• Production Directors

• Business analysts

• Small and medium business owners

• Startups founders

• Controllers

What will students need to know or do before starting this course?

• Basic or intermediate Excel

• Basic knowledge of economics or finance