Introduction to Lean for Service and Manufacturing

This course introduces you to the basic principles of Lean, which will help you create more efficient processes and get you on the road to successful operations management.

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FAQs

Lean for Business Organizations

After completing this topic, you should be able to match industry types with examples of how Lean principles are applied and identify the basic principles of Lean.

By adopting Lean practices, businesses are able to produce higher quality products faster, more cheaply, and more reliably. They create what their customers need using less inventory, space, energy, and time.

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By adopting Lean practices, businesses are able to produce higher quality products faster, more cheaply, and more reliably. They create what their customers need using less inventory, space, energy, and time.

The second Lean principle is achieving perfect flow in your organization's value stream. Value is defined as what a customer wants and is willing to pay for. The value stream is all the tasks, actions, and information used to create a deliverable and get it to the customer.

The fourth Lean principle is maintaining an efficient workplace to prevent workers from wasting time and effort searching for the tools or components they need to do their jobs.

Lean tools and principles can be used in the manufacturing industry. Many of these tools and principles can also be used in non-manufacturing and service industries, such as banking, healthcare and retail.

After completing this topic, you should be able to recognize correct application of the process for implementing Lean in an organization and order the steps in the Lean process.

A five-step process can help you implement Lean and begin reaping its benefits.

To reach your destination, you need a map. A five-step process can help you implement Lean and begin reaping its benefits. First you identify value and map the value stream. You create flow, establish pull, and, finally, seek perfection. The final step then leads back to the first step, creating a cycle.

First you should define value for each product or service your organization offers. This gives direction to the entire organization's work processes, determining what, how, and whether it should provide specific goods or services.

Once you've analyzed the value stream in your organization, the next step is to optimize the flow of value through it. This involves removing obstacles and bottlenecks. Three strategies for creating flow are organizing people, ensuring quality at the source, and ensuring that equipment is reliable and well maintained.

Establishing pull is about supplying products at the same rate at which the consumer demands or consumes them. You let customer demand pull production, instead of pushing products out to the customer based on forecasts.

The final step in Lean implementation is to continuously seek perfection – identifying and incrementally modifying practices that can be improved. A useful tool in implementing continuous improvement is the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, known for short as PDCA.

After completing this topic, you should be able to determine the best approach for integrating Lean and Six Sigma to address a given business need, match production management systems with their corresponding characteristics and match production management systems to corresponding business conditions that they are designed to address.

Lean is one of many improvement methodologies in use today focused at reducing wastes, creating value and streamlining operations. Six Sigma is an organization-wide improvement initiative that aims to reduce variation and defects in processes to achieve near perfection in goods and services. It minimizes defects and improves processes to deliver products and services that meet customer requirements, using statistical and other tools.

Use this follow-on activity to practice evaluating an improvement opportunity for Lean and Six Sigma implementation.

Lean is one of many improvement methodologies in use today focused on reducing wastes, creating value, and streamlining operations. This topic shows how Lean relates to one of the most popular of these improvement methodologies – Six Sigma.

To eliminate waste and to speed up processes, the department realizes it needs to incorporate Lean thinking into its system.

Combining Lean and Six Sigma enables you to improve quality, achieve maximum process speed, and reduce costs and waste. However, every organization is unique and requires its own mix of Lean and Six Sigma tools.

This course introduces you to the basic principles of Lean, which will help you create more efficient processes and get you on the road to successful operations management.

The Power of Professional Development - Why Investing in Your Career is Always Relevant

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