Essay on Lean Management

This means that stock levels of raw materials, work in progress, and even finished products are kept to a minimum. However, this system requires a very carefully planned scheduling for it to work. Inventory levels are closely monitored such that stock is only obtained when it is needed. This makes storage or warehousing easy since less space is required transportation as well.

Lean manufacturing is the production of goods using less of everything than in mass production: less human effort, less manufacturing space, less investment tools and less engineering time to develop a new product. A company becomes lean by continuously increasing its capacity to produce high-quality goods while simultaneously decreasing

The timing of capacity changes also needs to be taken into consideration to achieve maximum efficenty given that demands of their products varies with seasonal changes. The ability to react to market demand changes quickly will determine manufacturers flexibility in keeping up with these demands. Manufacturers needs facilities to produce, whether warehouses to store its raw materials or finished goods, or manufacturing plants to produce their products. Services facilities are needed by certain manufacturing industries such as consumer electronics to cater for returns. Distribution centres also determine the efficenty of production distribution and un-nesessary inventory holding will result in higher holding cost. Such facilities require large investments and are integral of the manufacturer’s supply chain strategy and thus proper planning is needed when making these decisions regardong the size, location which affect the overall operations. How manufacturers run their productions also determine how successful will they be in terms of productivity and quality levels. Different types of equipment and processes also affect the cost and output of the manufacturing plant. Information systems that flow both upstream and downstream affects the forecasting, planning, inventory and production levels, they must be robust to ensure the manufacturing firm is able to react accordingly to changing demands and variations. In addition to their internal environment,

Explain what should be considered when selecting a production method to suit a given product

“Lean is a systematic approach to identifying and eliminating waste (non-value-added activities) through continuous improvement by flowing the **product at the pull of the customer in pursuit of perfection.” Lockwood [24].

In an actual real-world corporate problem, say, if production in a plant were being analyzed, any instances in which the process goes out of control would have to be studied and necessary measures implemented to ensure the process is within its control limits at all times (Chase, Jacobs, & Aquilano, 2006).

The existing production schedule will be maximized with the use of a Materials Requirement Planning System. “To determine an acceptable feasible schedule to be released to the shop, trial master production schedules are run through the MRP program. The resulting planned

Lean manufacturing is the production of goods using less of everything than in mass production: less human effort, less manufacturing space, less investment tools and less engineering time to develop a new product. A company becomes lean by continuously increasing its capacity to produce high-quality goods while

Juarez requires improvements in quantity production, and problems with quality control, 3D printers, and shipping/damage. To increase the quantity of toys produced, they need more hours of training, and their equipment and process needs to be inspected and reviewed to determine why they had the largest amount of issues with quality control, 3D printers, and shipping/damages. While Dayton requires review into why their costs where the least favorable compared to standard. These types of actions fall under different types of control, pre, concurrent, and feedback. Pre-control occurs before the work is performed and is aimed at eliminating behavior that causes unfavorable results, such as training, while concurrently refers to employee performance or functioning equipment, and feedback refers to the post performance against standards (Omran, 2005, p. 32). Although corrective actions are to be taken due to deviations from the plan, there are other methods of determining deviations from the standard.

In order to achieve excellent production capacity and reducing the overall costs the production manager has to find an optimal structure of aggregate planning which will help achieving qualitative and quantitative aspects of the organization.

Production Concept: The production concept is the process of making and distributing the products to the business outlets. Some businesses only focus on its production process rather than the distribution process. The whole production concept consists of quality control of the product, testing and measurement of the product.

M&L Manufacturing makes various components for printers and copiers. The company supplies these items to a major manufacturer. The company also distributes these and similar items to office supply stores and computer stores as replacement parts for printers and desktop copiers. In all, the company manufactures about 20 different items to distribute. The two markets (the major manufacturer and the replacement market) require somewhat different handling. Product for the major manufacturer can be shipped in bulk. However, the products for the retail segment must be packaged individually which requires additional handling and expense. Instead of using forecasting for production planning the operations manager decides which

Planning- the planning department translate the concepts into design and determines resources requirements, including raw material. Planning also projects sales and develops production plans for each product, timeframes for production runs and scheduling of production runs.

The application and implementation of lean principles or thinking is a process that requires commitment from every stakeholder in the organization. This process entails commitment to the organization's workers and to the system itself in order to make changes towards improvement. Generally, the implementation of lean thinking is geared towards continuous improvement through the elimination of waste. However, lean management or implementation of the principles sometimes incorporate mistakes that are made by leaders in the execution process. This is mainly because lean leadership appears to be simple though its complex because of the costs associated with it. The mistakes usually occur because of intrinsic complexities of exploring deeply into organizational philosophies, business strategy, psychology, and macroeconomics.

· Operations control methods assess how efficiently and effectively an organization's transformation processes create goods and services. Methods of transformation controls include Total Quality Management (TQM) statistical process control and the inventory management control. Statistical process control is the use of statistical methods and procedures to determine whether production operations are being performed correctly, to detect any deviations, and to find and eliminate their causes. A control chart displays the results of measurements over time and provides a visual means of determining whether a specific process is staying within predefined limits. As long as the process variables fall within the acceptable range, the system is in control.