How can you ensure a sustainable lean manufacturing culture during growth or change?

Stick to your value stream mapping and always! If there is a change on process, material flow, information flow, VSM need to be updated to reflect current status, the future status is drived by leadership team-aligned with vision and goals. Each function department need to identify what need to be done to eliminate waste, each employee shall be able to decide what they can do to eliminate wastes. Leadership need to recognize small improvement frequently and timely, celebrate success.

When implementing lean manufacturing from scratch, use empathy and simple language. Share stories, listen actively, and address concerns to inspire trust and collaboration. Sharing the board's vision ensures alignment throughout the organization, guiding employees' actions and decisions toward common goals, fostering unity and clarity. Giving relevance and respecting all employees perspectives, opinions and core values guarantees the success.

To ensure a sustainable lean manufacturing culture during growth or change, continuously engage and train employees at all levels in lean principles, encourage open communication and feedback, and systematically integrate lean practices into every aspect of the organization's processes and decision-making.

Define specific objectives for your short-term (1-2 years) and long-term (3-5 years) vision and ambitions in accordance with your company or group's overarching vision and mission. Establish explicit priorities and expectations, outlining key focus areas. Disseminate information across all divisions and sections through workshops. Develop a comprehensive action plan and monitor progress regularly, either on a monthly or weekly basis, depending on the nature of the initiative.

Adopting LEAN manufacturing culture is a quite long journey.Each and everyone has to get involved, So a very able leadership is required who has the capability to understand even a small improvement anywhere, and publicise it,which is very big motivational factor and celebrate it.Once the leader is able to have all the employees in high motivated state, and imbibe them with the feeling of ownership,then the improvements will start flowing from everywhere. The basic theory of LEAN is to remove waste of all kinds, materials,energy,time and of course any thing. And LEAN is not a destination, but is a journey, beautiful, enjoyable and makes everyone associated a happy satisfied soul.

Empowering people is the only one main aspect of successful lean culture implementation in any organization. Everyone needs to take responsibility, people should take decisions, they need to be involved in problem solving. Training of all lean tools is a must for everyone to get them to understand how to use each and every tool. Organization needs to encourage people to come up with new ideas and good ideas should get rewarded too, this will involve everyone in the successful lean journey.

My perspective is learning manufacturing culture empowers people by fostering collaboration, efficiency, and a sense of purpose. It instills a commitment to quality, continuous improvement, and a shared understanding of organizational goals. This knowledge equips individuals with skills to contribute effectively, enhances problem-solving abilities, and promotes a positive work environment, ultimately empowering them to thrive in the manufacturing industry.

Empowering long-time staff specifically in a company with an old culture to embrace lean manufacturing principles can be really challenging. There’s a must many companies and managers are not taking into consideration: Respect Their Experience. Acknowledge the expertise and experience of long-time employees. Encourage them to share their knowledge and insights about the company’s processes and operations. You will have a double win ??

Growth and change is an essential part of any company that wants to stay open for business. However every grow plan and vision needs to be clearly communicated with the people to avoid any misleading information.

Capacita??o é a chave para que o processo seja otimizado e atravesse as mudan?as, crescimento de forma sustentável. Inserir no contexto alguns agentes de mudan?as ajuda na velocidade de transforma??o e inspira o time. Importante seguir capacitando pessoas. Os resultados s?o extraordinários para ambos.

Doing the same things differently is inefficient! When you have someone from one shift performing better than the colleague from the other shift, this is a good sign you must standardize the routine. Standard work is paramount to obtain the best performance and results. Understand the best performers routine, document (standardize) and train everyone with the same process. This will allow the process to achieve the best performance. After you get to the point process performance stability, perform new evaluation to identify new improvement opportunities. Implement them, document and train again… Repeat this cycle over and over again, until perfection. To illustrate this, think on the Formula One pit stop process.

Lean manufacturing thrives in an environment of continuous growth and change. It can quickly adapt to the challenges of a VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) environment. It can add value by implementing agile frameworks such as Scrum, XP (Xtreme Programming), or any other framework that aligns with the organization's Lean maturity levels and needs. Designing a comprehensive Learning & Development plan is essential to ensure that experts become lean manufacturing advocates. This will help teach a continuous learning and development culture and ensure that experts remain current with industry trends and best practices.

To ensure a sustainable lean manufacturing culture during growth or change by implementing standard work, Clearly document standard procedures for every task and process within the organization, Review and update standard work documents regularly to reflect any changes in processes or best practices, Establish a feedback mechanism for employees to suggest improvements to standard work procedures, fostering continuous improvement.

Utilize the standard work document to address inquiries about the new process, ensuring alignment among all team members. Avoid relying solely on it as an audit tool, as this may discourage individuals from engaging in the actual process to achieve better audit scores later.

Stability doesn’t exist! The only certainty that we have everywhere is change. Having that said, if change is a constant in our lives, let’s embrace it and make a change for better. In order to make this happen, have a growth mindset, learning and making things in a different (and better) way is paramount to embrace change. Tune your approach, having a systematic manner to see behaviors, processes and routine might help. A possibility is to map the current situation and foresee which improvements you can apply so a future state could be better. This is not only applicable to processes, but to behaviors and routines. So, why don’t you go ahead and embrace the change? Improve your life and work. ??

Effective communication is crucial in lean manufacturing to facilitate change and align efforts with customer needs. Emphasizing customer perspectives fosters a culture of continuous improvement, driving efficiency and quality. Clear, transparent communication ensures all stakeholders understand their role in delivering value, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Without customer-oriented communication processes may become inefficient, leading to decreased quality and customer dissatisfaction. Always start with yourself!

Kaizen, or continuous improvement, is the idea that the whole company is focused on improving and building on previous knowledge and mistakes. O strongly believe a culture change in the organisation needs to take place in order to implement kaizen successfully. Operators need to care more about their work and managers need to shift away from volume based metrics to promote quality output.

My opinion is Learning manufacturing culture enhances change and improvement in the industry by instilling a mindset of adaptability and innovation. It encourages employees to embrace new technologies, methodologies, and processes. Continuous improvement becomes a shared goal, driving efficiency gains and product quality enhancements. Additionally, a culture of learning promotes the identification and resolution of challenges, fostering a dynamic and responsive manufacturing environment.

Always take time to stop, reflect, react, and move forward. Utilize this approach to pivot or confirm the direction you are heading, and always involve people in the decision-making process. Ultimately, they are the ones who will drive the actions

Educar e treinar constantemente os funcionários sobre os princípios da manufatura enxuta e sua importancia para a sustentabilidade. Priorizar a melhoria contínua e a elimina??o de desperdícios em todos os processos. Envolver os funcionários em todas as etapas do processo de mudan?a, incentivando a colabora??o. Manter uma mentalidade flexível e adaptável para ajustar as práticas de manufatura conforme necessário. Incorporar práticas sustentáveis em todas as opera??es. Estabelecer metas claras e mensuráveis relacionadas à sustentabilidade e monitorar regularmente o progresso em dire??o a essas metas. Manter a transparência e a comunica??o aberta em todos os níveis da organiza??o para garantir o alinhamento de todos.

Top management committment will be the most important. Whatever the number of growth has been planned, and how big changes has been planned, as dar the top management has been committed will be no issue. The best approach are using lean manufacturing way of working to be applied from early step of growth plan & changes plan.

In my experience the entity wants to escalate in big market has to be think of this lean manufacturing in a sustainable growth environment. The Management should be in open minded and transparent to their employees and also with other business leaders. To establish a continual growth their should be philanthropic leadership personality, in which the entity will become a sustainable lean management with employees empowered driven company. Last self discipline is important to everyone. It’s recommended to teach in company through leaders, because the maximum time burn out by employees at office, meanwhile the company should train the staff related to values system of human beings and this will also transferred to their families as well.

For a manufacturing organisation to be sustainable through times of growth and change it needs to be profitable. My two top tips for building a lean manufacturing culture are: 1. Focus on core value - invest in improving activities that adds value in the making of the product which a customer will be willing to pay for. Lean every other supporting process and function. 2. Understand and optimise your key profit levers - examples such as raw inputs, OEE, etc all significantly drive manufacturing margin.

In my experience at work , any growth or change happening in layout or process or technology comes with problems that need to be solved with standardization. After standardization you need to give time for stabilization in terms of consistency check on the deliverable - to see if there is any other factor that is hindering the achievement of the output expected. Once done this phase in the value stream mapping , before moving to future state map or the kaikaku state , one need to list the risks and its contingency to mitigate with clear proactive forecasting approach. For example Poka yoke or the defect proofing in process is the best solution to sustain the consistency in output of Good parts to support the downstream or the next process.