Lean-5 Key Principles of Lean

Let us now discuss the five key lean principles, which is a cycle that can be used to implement lean effectively in any organization. The cycle is similar to a PDCA cycle for Process improvement – Plan, DO, Check, and Act.? The five principles contributing to the Lean cycle -are Identify Value, Mapping the Value stream, Create Flow, Establish Pull, and Seek Perfection. Let us now discuss these principles in detail.

Five Key Lean Principles

The first principle is to identify value from the customer's perspective. Value is defined as a change in shape or form. Whenever we are doing activities like Painting, Electrical work, machining, and so on, we are adding value to the customer, but when we are doing rework or scrapping items, we are not adding value to the customer. The customer is willing to pay only for the products or services that add value to him. Hence the activities for which the customer is willing to pay are considered as Value Added Activities – VA and he is not willing to pay for activities done in our processes not adding value to him and such activities are called Non Value Added Activities – NVA.

For example, we are painting a car with a color matching the customer's performance, he is willing to pay for the cost and the service and we consider it as Value Added activity.? However, if we have painted the car with the wrong color initially and then do the rework to match the customer's preference, he is not willing to pay for the additional cost of rework and hence we consider it as a non-value-added Activity

The second principle is to Map the Value stream, In this step, we divide the end-to-end process into subprocesses and then into activities and categorize the activities into Value added, Non-non-value-added, and Business Non-neg-added activities. We then work an elaborate plan to eliminate the value-added activities and reduce the? Business nonvalue-added activities? by eliminating, combining, or automating these activities so that the process becomes more efficient and adds more value to the customer with fewer resources

The third principle is to Create Flow, meaning we should have a continuous flow of, products, services, and information in our production processes so that the efficiency of our processes can be improved.? If the flow is not continuous, inventory piles up between processes, setup time and wastage due to setups increases and the rework increases affecting the efficiency of our processes to a great extent. The concept of reduced batch sizes improving the efficiency of the processes has been well established over the past several years. Continuous Flow or Single piece workflow is the most efficient process and is used in the assembly of cars and airplanes with great success. This concept is also called a Moving Assembly Line.

The fourth principle is to Establish Pull. In this step, we ensure that any production activity is not taken up without a firm commitment from the customer. We always find that the best quality of our product or services are dispatched within the shortest possible time with the minimum wastage of resources when there is a pull from the customer. Establishing the pull from the customer means that the customer will pull the material from QC, QC will pull the material from production, production will pull the material from the stores, stores will pull the material from the supplier, and so on.

The fifth and the last principle is to Work toward perfection.? We should ensure that we are repeatedly applying all the four concepts discussed above so that the processes become more and more perfect and efficient and the wastages are considerably reduced.

To conclude, the first step for effective lean implementation is to define value from a customer perspective, map the value stream for the end-to-end process to identify and eliminate non-value-added processes, create a continuous flow of work, ensure that there is a firm order from the customer for taking up production and repeat these steps to seek perfection.