FUTURE TECHNOLOGY
• Improved design and delivery data through web-portal collaboration with customers and suppliers
• Reduced data input and errors through sharing common data from design to manufacture, installation and service
• Increased business capacity through synchronising delivery milestones with current work tasks
• Reduced customer delivery cycle times through parallel planning and concurrent activities
• Improved customer delivery dates from common data and integrated design, build and install solution
• Improved customer satisfaction from better quality, lower prices and ontime delivery
• Improved quality and design by analysing failures.
When adopting the concepts of a lean enterprise, a systematic approach is needed. An organisation needs to develop a strategy for deploying these concepts and there are a range of systems and technologies to guide them through this process.
Adopting lean principles enables a company to remain competitive and improve its position in the market. In a region that is becoming more brand dominated it will be the most effective for enterprises that aim to dominate the market and own the leading brands within the region.
Less well run organisations that do not have efficient and effective processes will have to reduce assets to survive, resulting in brands being traded as a means of survival.
There are five basic principles to adopting lean principles:
1 Value
Lean thinking demands that anything that does not add value to a customer must be eliminated. It is vital to understand that, only what your customers perceive as value is important. This often requires a complete review of each step in the customer buying process to create for them a hassle-free buying and service experience.
If customers believe that short order lead time from their suppliers is the differentiating factor in the market, within given standards of quality and functionality, then those who can respond the fastest will dominate. Price may become a secondary issue, so premium pricing may apply to those who deliver in the shortest time.
2
Value Stream
Once an enterprise understands the value that it delivers to its customers, there is a need to analyse all the steps in their business processes to determine which ones actually add value. It would need to review those processes that add value to see how these can be improved to provide better customer value.
3 Flow
This relates to the uninterrupted movement of physical objects and data within the enterprise. In a complex engineer – to-order company, this will mean that information from design will flow into engineering and into estimating and into projects and then to procurement. In a complex contract this will mean that as sections are completed in one department, they are made available to others, rather than a single department spending weeks completing the contract before any information is made available.
Flow challenges the tradition of processing in batches and moving these batches from one department to another or from one machine to the next. This requires the removal of physical barriers and co-operation across functions. The goal is to reduce the time it takes to complete an end-to-end process.
4 Pull
Rather than working from a forecast of potential customer demands, referred to as push system, the goal in Lean is to perform a process by linking it directly to a real customer demand, referred to as pull system. Often in engineer – to-order organisations, there are broken links between when the customer requires part of the delivery to when the delivery is available.
5 Perfection
As you continually eliminate waste from your processes and flow information, product or services, you will realise that there are always changes that can be made in the goal of perfection. The continual re-evaluation of the entire value stream is essential to remove noncustomer value adding activities.
These five lean principles need to all work together and are fundamental to the elimination of wasted time, money and product. Companies working in the steel and manufacturing sectors need to revisit each of them as improvements in one area provide opportunities for improvements in another.
The process of developing a Lean enterprise never ends. Lean is not a destination but a journey. There is always something else that you can do to reduce waste or improve upon a process.
Luis Ortega is Managing Director of IFS Middle East, Africa and South Asia
40 Issue 01 INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS