Lean Manufacturing Techniques Can Help Your Shop
As a manufacturer, you are always looking for ways to increase your output. Too often, the first thought is to buy more equipment. However, you can look to a production method like lean manufacturing to help improve your output—and trust us, this costs considerably less than buying new equipment.
Lean manufacturing may seem complex, but it is based on two simple ideas: single-minute exchange of dies (SMED) and value-stream mapping (VSM).
SMED focuses on reducing machine changeover and setup times. The goal is to have your machine running, making product, and not sitting and waiting for a changeover.
The key focus areas of SMED are:
- Removing all unnecessary steps
- Standardizing as much as possible between changeovers
- Moving steps outside the machine
- Having tooling and material ready to go
Want to learn more about SMED? Click here: Utilizing SMED as a Lean Processing Tool
VSM focuses on identifying the waste in your process. The customer only wants to pay for the product—not extra motion, processing, and such. When performing a value-stream map, you literally walk through the entire process, stopping at each step of the operation. It is important to document the actual time it takes to complete each step and to ask how it is done and why it is done that way. Then, review each step, brainstorming for better ways to complete it. During review, you may even determine a step can be eliminated.
The key to VSM success is to question everything, keep an open mind, and include people who are familiar and unfamiliar with the process. People who are unfamiliar with the process often ask great questions and bring new ideas to the discussion.
Want to see an example of Acuity’s Manufacturing Consultant, Mike Schlagenhaufer, using the strategies outlined above to help a customer reduce their manufacturing time from 55 to 22 minutes? Watch here: Manufacturing Case Study: Metal Fabrication Services.
Mike Schlagenhaufer is a speaker at FABTECH 2022. You can hear him speak in the following sessions: WS01: Getting Started in Industrial Robotics Workshop: What You Need to Know, F52: How to Build a Better Supply Chain for Your Business, F23: What You Need to Understand Before Thinking About Running Your Shop Lights-Out, F54: Risk Radar & Developing and Testing Incident Response Plans, F57: Do You Know How Much Money You’re Losing Due to Equipment Breakdown?, and F68: Lean Tools for Industry 4.0 Continuous Improvement.
