Lean Roadmap Book

INTRODUCTION TO LEAN ROADMAP The primary objective of a Lean Roadmap is to achieve the shortest production lead-time in your addressed market space and to deliver on time to the customer?s request date with little or even no finished goods inventory. Additional objectives of a successful Lean Roadmap implementation are reduced overhead structure, reduced quality costs, productivity improvements, and reduced floor space required to operate your business. Part I of Lean Roadmap is an overview of the eleven essential building blocks required for a successful Lean Roadmap design. A successful design and implementation will yield significant improvements in your business. Use the first part of the book to achieve an understanding of how the building blocks complement one another and provide a straightforward roadmap for lean design. Lean design and implementation in your business is not difficult to accomplish. The 11 Lean Roadmap building blocks are clearly detailed in this book. These building blocks are the required elements for the design, planning, and daily management of a successful supply-chain management system. Lean Roadmap Business Improvement Deliverables Eliminate or significantly reduce both work in process and finished goods inventory. Reduce lead times from weeks to days/hours. Significantly improve customer on-time delivery (to the customer?s date). Eliminate wasteful steps in the manufacturing process and realize gains in productivity. Reduce floor space required, making room for additional product lines with the same bricks and mortar. Configure MRP/ERP for lean. Utilize your current business software investment and realize significant reductions in excess overhead. Use the power of your current business software to establish a required supply chain configuration. Convert from a forecast for finished goods inventory to a forecast for kanban and assemble or make-to-order business. Seamless and accurate scheduling of customer orders at order entry, matching capacity to demand, using the Assemble to Capacity process (ATC). Assemble on-demand product configurations the customer orders. Point-of-use inventory at the production cells controlled at the point of assembly, and managed/reordered by the people who assemble/manufacture the product. Inventory replacement via kanban; only material consumed by the customer is reordered. Measurement, control, and improvement of performance measurements linked from plant to cell level. Lean Roadmap will clearly detail the business process building-block designs required for your company to achieve significant improvements. The following table is an example of improvement types and magnitude of improvements you should expect, depending on the current state of your business. The listed improvements are easy to achieve utilizing the Lean Roadmap building blocks for design, planning, and management of your supply chain. The chart values are based on historical achievements experienced in working with actual businesses. Lean Roadmap will explain how to: Define and calculate performance measurements that link to required business improvements. Enable a lean organizational structure that places ownership for plant and business improvement where it belongs, yielding consistent Lean Roadmap design and shortened implementation times. Utilize a disciplined process to quantify current process steps, costs, and lead-times used to manufacture products, develop a future state vision (floor plan), project expected savings, cost-to-implement, and timeline for implementation. Thus, you know the potential $ improvement and cost to implement before starting the process. Design a lean supply chain planning and management process for products that yields significant improvements in inventory turns, productivity, and on-time customer delivery. Configure and supplement your current MRP/ERP business software for lean. Plan a simple and effective lean supply chain that matches customer demand to available capacity, replenishing material as the customer purchases products. Manage a lean supply chain: accurate customer scheduling at order entry, building to customer demand, and replacing material as it is consumed. Lean Roadmap is designed to be an easy study, and I suggest you keep a notebook and calculator close by as you read. The Lean Roadmap processes and calculations described are easy to follow; your notebook will record ideas that apply to your business. Whether you are a business leader or a lean leader, your understanding of the Lean Roadmap building block steps and logical design calculations will arm you with the knowledge to steer a successful lean design for your business. The hours you commit to the understanding of the Lean Roadmap building blocks will pay enormous dividends in the future. Lean Roadmap is a proven and logical building block process, complete with respect to both material flow (supplier to customer) and information flow (customer to supplier), defined step by step. When you understand the Lean Roadmap supply chain process and develop a design for your business, all that remains is to do it. The difficulties encountered with a lean implementation generally occur with the information flow processes of forecasting, customer order entry, scheduling, and materials management. Lean Roadmap explains in detail the information flow business processes required. In the past, no matter how well we planned and managed material flow through the supply chain, information flow process adversely affected us in several ways: 1. We booked customer orders to infinite capacity. 2. We experienced material shortages and inadequate replenishment of materials required to meet customer demand. 3. We used supplier lead-times of weeks. Self-imposed lead-times of weeks, designed to assist in on-time delivery, actually have the opposite effect. Instead of lead-times of weeks, only hours or days are required to satisfy customer requirements for product. Without a simplified and effective information flow process that supports the material flow in both planning and execution, the supply chain management process will continue to experience failure. Lean Roadmap solves these problems. If you are wondering why Lean Roadmap is not a thicker book, it?s because the process is quite simple to understand. The essence of lean is waste reduction and simplicity. Lean supply-chain management is not complicated, and when you read and understand this book?s contents and the logic of the process steps, I hope you will agree that more pages would simply be wasteful?and we live lean. I suggest you make a copy of the glossary of terms located in the back of the book for easy reference. It will provide you with definitions used in this book and is the basis for a common Lean Roadmap vocabulary for your business. Note: A serious management team dedicated to a Lean Roadmap outcome should plan around a 1-year timeframe for significant implementation and realization of benefits as defined by your performance measurements and detailed in a future state design. As you implement lean in a value stream, the firefighting is replaced with time for planning and managing the business.Read More