As environmental impact concerns the manufacturing industry, manufacturers today are turning to LEAN MANUFACTURING to eliminate potential waste.

Lean Manufacturing was created under the core principle to remove operational waste and add value in each production phase. The term Lean Manufacturing simply means the optimization of production practices to eliminate unnecessary areas of waste.

The adoption of lean manufacturing delivers real time data, optimizes best practices, lowers operating costs, improves productivity and satisfies customer demands for high quality products. At Overlake Oil, our experts identify potential areas of waste and implement lean solutions to directly benefit production. Lean Manufacturing starts with assessing each type of waste, which can be anything from overstock inventory to shortening production cycles. It is crucial to pinpoint each potential type of waste to fully understand how it impacts the big picture. Over time, the buildup of waste can be just as harmful to production as the buildup of sludge is to a machine.

To protect your production, you need to know the eight areas of waste which include; defects, overproduction, waiting, non-utilized talent, transportation, inventory, motion and extra-processing. An easy acronym to remember this by is DOWNTIME. Waste = DOWNTIME and it is the first component to learn in order to implement Lean Manufacturing! Each area of waste impacts time, money, resources, product quality and overall customer satisfaction. To help you stop wasting downtime, we’ve broken down each area of waste to guide you towards a leaner manufacturing process.

• Defects are caused by rework, scrap, and incorrect information
• Overproduction is production that is more than needed or before is needed
• Waiting relates to wasted time waiting for the next step in a process
• Non-Utilized Talent means underutilizing talents, skills and knowledge
• Transportation relates to unnecessary movements of products and materials
• Inventory as in excess products and materials not being processed
• Motion relates to unnecessary movements by people *i.e. Walking
• Extra-Processing means more work or higher quality than is required

Sources: Machine Metrics and Go Lean Six Sigma

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Written by: Tia Fraatz