Lean Manufacturing Training

Lean Manufacturing training courses cover a lot of different subjects, this hub will detail out some of the most common courses, what the objective of the course should be and typical formats for the course.

Lean manufacturing is a very wide subject, for more information you could look at the following hubs;

What is Lean Manufacturing

History of Lean Manufacturing

Benefits of lean Manufacturing

Just In Time

Lean manufacturing training courses are available in a wide variety of formats from many different providers, in my mind I would always try to have a course for specific tools that is implemented within your own organization so that the learning can be immediately used to affect within your processes as part of the training. There is nothing worse than sending people off on a training course at great expense only to have them return and not have an immediate chance to put into practice what they have learned and when they do finally see action they have forgotten what they were shown.

Lean manufacturing is a philosophy as well as a collection of tools, it is important that people understand this philosophy, without this understanding many implementations fail. This failure is usually because the senior management only consider the individual tools as a cost saving exercise and forget about the customer and involving the employees.

This type of lean manufacturing training course can be delivered at any venue, externally or in house and can be tailored to reflect the seniority of the people attending. This is often run as a “freebie” by a number of consultancies / training providers as part of their sales pitch, often being tailored to the specific industry and your position within it, generally as an attempt to frighten you into buying their services before a competitor does! Motivation for the course apart, this is a very necessary course if you want you people to understand what you are trying to achieve through implementing lean manufacturing.

5S workplace organisation is one of the building blocks of lean manufacturing, it is probably the first tool that any company implements and is often implemented in isolation to anything else within the philosophy of lean. This is also a surprising powerful method to improve overall efficiencies and is a very good way to justify a full lean manufacturing implementation.

The aim of 5S is to organize the workplace to become more efficient, this is achieved by removing all clutter and arranging materials and tools in such a manner as to be ergonomic and clear. This can result in efficiency improvements of between 10% to 30%, people sometimes forget how powerful 5S can be when properly applied.

Again this lean manufacturing training course can be run off site, normally using simple paper exercises to scratch out letters or numbers against the clock and showing the level of improvements that can be made through the steps of 5S.

This is however much better run as an internal course with your workplace being the workshop for improvement. 5S training is far better run in this manner, normally split over a number of weeks to ensure that progress is constant and sustained. Sometimes in the west 5S is also called 5C.

SMED or Single Minute Exchange of Die is a tool that focuses on setup reduction. The aim of this tool is to reduce setup times from hours down to a few minutes, this is done within JIT/Lean to enable smaller batches and flow although many companies implement this as a stand alone tool just to have less non-productive time on their process equipment and gain additional capacity.

This lean manufacturing training course can be run externally, generally using a simulation “game” with teams competing to reduce setups after having the principles explained. The best method of training by far however is with an in-house course with the training being conducted on a live process. This gives you not only the benefit of having your people being trained, but having the setup time on a specific process reduced.

This tool can often reduce setups from a few hours or more to literally single minutes, I have seen production lines that used to take a whole day to strip down and reset back to producing good product within a few minutes.

Kaizen is about “change for the better”, it is a Continual Improvement exercise utilizing all of your people to make many small improvements to continually reduce waste and improve efficiencies of your processes. This is a very powerful strategy and the training should be something that is revisited over a number of months rather than a one hit type of training.

The aim of the kaizen training is to put in place a process to continually improve your performance across a wide range of areas using many small improvements instigated by your employees. This training will usually also include sections on flow and the seven wastes.

Again this lean manufacturing training course should be conducted in house where the trainer can facilitate a kaizen event or kaizen blitz and the forming of kaizen teams and coach them in how to approach, find and resolve opportunities for improvement.

Just In Time (JIT) is one of the main parts behind the philosophy of lean, it is the principle of making what the customer wants when the customer wants it. Creating flow at the pull of the customer with close coupled layouts and Kanban systems.

This is a very complicated philosophy and the training is delivered as part of an overall implementation of lean. More often than not this training is conducted using a factory simulation using lego blocks or stickle bricks to produce products for the customer. Run over several rounds the participants try to satisfy the customer, making improvements each and every round until at the end they are able to easily without any effort give the customer what they want which is in complete contrast to the chaos that reigns at the start. Often with financial scoring so that the trainees see how the changes they make impact on company profitability.

The simulation is very powerful, it is rare to find individuals who are not inspired to make some form of improvement in their workplace after doing this exercise.

Value stream mapping is a very powerful tool, by defining the sequence of operations within your processes and recording all relevant data you can identify all those areas of waste within them. This tool often results in a set of data that acts as a major wake up call for the company. Typically total processing time for products of a few hours at most with lead times through your factory of many weeks and huge delays through administrative departments.

This lean manufacturing training course could be run in house or off site, but again the real value of the training comes from implementing the learning there and then. Always try to run this course in house so as to gain as much benefit and insight into your own processes.

I mention this here not because you should get training in the seven wastes but because the seven wastes are often taught as an integral part of all of the above courses, unless you fully understand the principles of adding value and what constitutes non-value adding (waste) then it will be difficult for you to recognize it and eliminate it. You can increase profit through waste reduction once you are able to identify what the wastes within your processes are.

Most training courses will cover this aspect of lean as well as a basic overview of the whole lean process.

Many of the principles of Lean manufacturing training can be just as effective when employed in an office environment as on the factory floor. It is possible to tailor any of the above techniques and principles and create a Lean Office training course such as 5S office training.

The principles of Lean and Six Sigma are very much linked and more and more people are now seeing that they are not competing philosophies that have to be implemented in their own right. More and more consultancies and training bodies are now combining the strengths of these two philosophies into "Lean Six Sigma" or just "Lean Sigma".

Lean is very good at looking at the overall picture and direction of a company and ensuring that processes are focused on customer needs and controlled so as not to produce defects, six sigma is great at reducing variation within those then controlled processes. Implementing Lean to ensure control and then using six sigma principles to reduce variation is a very sound and effective way to achieve improvement.

This sort of lean manufacturing training is best tailored specifically for your needs and delivered in house.

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/home.cfm 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 to help you improve your business.