Hire a Lean Trainer

This hub will help you to work through the process of how to hire a lean trainer, it will look at how to specify your training outcomes, hiring the right trainer and monitoring the training outcomes to ensure that you achieved your objectives.

Before I get started I should remind you as to what is lean manufacturing, lean is a improvement philosophy and a collection of tools that focuses on providing value to the customer, by creating a value stream along which the value flows at the pull of the customer without delays or being held in inventory. Lean requires respect for your employees and their involvement in a drive to continually improve your processes. The following hubs contain further information which will help you in your understanding of Lean Manufacturing;

What is lean manufacturing

History of lean manufacturing

Benefits of lean manufacturing

Just In Time

If you want to know what sort of training is available have a look at lean manufacturing training.

The need for a lean trainer is a very simple one, if you lack the skills within your workforce to implement lean manufacturing then you need to impart these skills to them. Your choices are to use either a lean consultant or to find a lean trainer to impart this knowledge.

Without continually training your employees your business skills will stagnate and your business will be overtaken by those businesses that do invest in their employees. Investing in your employees also indicates to them how much they are valued and how much they can impact the success of the organization and hence their own future.

The benefits of lean manufacturing are huge, often simple changes making efficiency improvements of 20% to 30%. Lean will help you improve profits by removing the seven wastes from your processes. Lean is not just for manufacturing, lean is applicable to any industry as it is about focusing on giving your customer value at the least cost to yourself, so go out and learn about lean and implement it in your organisation.

The easiest place to find a lean trainer in today’s age is on the internet, search for “lean training” but include your geographical region in the search term and you will be able to find training providers in your vicinity, also search business directories as many businesses fail to provide a meaningful descrition to their websites so you can’t actually find them when searching for trainers, only if you use their company name.

Use trade publications and directories that are often delivered free of charge as well as local business magazines which may contain useful contacts.

Network locally with other businesses, business support groups, even your own bank, all of whom may be able to give you recommendations as to who you should go to.

The hub, how to find a lean trainer will give you additional tips and details of how to go about finding yourself the right lean trainer for your business improvement project.

Before you hire a lean trainer you need to specify exactly what it is that you are looking to achieve. By this I mean focus on the outcomes you expect for the business, after all you want to use training to improve your business in some way. Do not try to think in terms of tools, let the trainer define the tools (unless you are just looking for a brief overview type of training), think of the change you want to see in your business.

For instance, you may wish to have better organized more efficient work cells in your production area. Let the trainer come in, see what you do and propose the training that needs to be done and the best method to do it. Don't assume that you know the best way to achieve your aims and what training is the best to implement, use the skill and experience of the trainer to define what you really need. If the trainer is not able to specify what you need or is unsure and gives you multiple choices to make, does he really know his subject? Lean Manufacturing Training covers a lot of subjects and individual tools, ensure that you choose the right and most effective tool for the changes you need to make.

Be specific about your expectations, that way you can measure later if your expectations were actually met. If you want setups to be reduced by 20% did the training that you had achieve that?

Finding a lean trainer can be relatively easy with the number of providers out there, getting a good one at the right price can be a little more difficult.

The first thing to consider is there CV or Resume, this may be a personal one in the way of an individual or the sales paperwork and website of the company detailing experience and achievements. Your shortlist will be formed from these in much the same way that you would select any other employee.

Once you have your shortlist you need to interview, obviously if you are just looking to send a couple of guys off on a 2 hour course it is unlikely that you will get the provider to meet with you, but if you are looking to do some substantial training then they should be more than willing to meet with you to develop a proposal. Where possible meet with the people that will actually do the training, not a highly persuasive sales man who will then leave you with an inexperienced junior without any form of personality!

Bring the prospective trainers in, explain what it is you hope to achieve, let them see the areas involved and meet some of the people that will trained and let them give you their proposals as to what training is required and how it should be delivered to achieve the outcome that you desire.

Ask for references, you want to approach a selection of their past clients for whom they have delivered the same or similar training, check what training has been delivered as often trainers have their areas of strength, you need to make sure that your training is in that category. Ensure that the training has had a positive and measurable impact on those businesses, many businesses however fail to measure the actual impact training has had.

Ask the trainers to define the outcomes of the training, ask them to define the benefits that you will see from implementing the training. After all you want to see what their opinion is and their confidence levels as to what can be achieved.

Before you undertake any training, you need to define what the objectives are of that training, if we are undertaking SMED and 5S training with an objective of taking 20% off of all change over times we will need a base line measure, where are we today, and then continue to monitor over time as the training takes place and the changes implemented post training.

What ever the objectives are that are set for the training they should be SMART, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time limited. Failure to do this will give you objectives that are either unachievable or you will be left wondering afterwards whether you achieved them or not.

These measures need to be monitored after the training and on an ongoing basis to see how things continue to improve and to ensure that they do not slip back. It is only if you achieve your objectives and sustain those objectives that you can say that the training was effective, too many companies fail to measure their training effectiveness and therefore fail to justify the cost of training by showing direct benefits.

In many companies the first thing that suffers when times are hard is the training budget as it is easy to cut, however if you can show clear cut improvements that impact the bottom line of the business then it is much easier to justify the need for training.

The following are useful links for business support and lean manufacturing resources.

http://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/ Institute for Manufacturing

http://www.thecqi.org/ Chartered Quality Institute

http://asq.org/ American Society of Quality

http://www.nam.org/ American National Association of Manufacturers

http://www.bis.gov.uk/ UK Department for Business Innovation and Skills

http://trade.gov/ International Trade Administration USA

http://www.mas.bis.gov.uk/ UK Manufacturing Advisory Service

http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/home UK Business Link

http://www.business.gov/ US Business Link

http://www2.toyota.co.jp/en/vision/production_system/index.html Toyota

http://www.smmt.co.uk Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders

http://www.aiag.org/scriptcontent/index.cfm Automotive Industry Action Group

These Links will help you to find more information regarding lean manufacturing training and as to how to hire a lean trainer.