Lean productivity Vs batch efficiencyOne question any conventional manufacturer or a batch manufacturer might ask before they want to change in to lean manufacturing will similar to this “my batch production works well. My people are mighty efficient. They are good at their work and they are specialists. Lean manufacturing talks about multi skilled workers. Multi skilled workers are not efficient as my specialists. How on earth lean manufacturing can improve my system? Yes I am with the above manufacturer. Specialists are good and efficient. No doubt about it. But lean manufacturing is not only dependent on the efficiencies of the people or few operations to deliver value. Lean manufacturing looks at the entire organization as a one unit when it comes to remove inefficiencies from the system. As I discussed with my last article on my blog, only very small percentage of activities and processes add value. According to the concept of lean manufacturing, anything that does not add value to the final product is a waste. I highlighted in that article only 2% of the activities add vale to the final product. 10% of the activities can not be eliminated. But 88% of the activities carried out are wastes. Traditional manufacturers work on improving the efficiencies of workers. That’s fine. Let’s say they improved their workers efficiency by Amazing 50%. How much value they will add to the final product. The increment of value addition will only be 6%. Why is that? Because they only work on the 12% of the activities. The calculation looks like this.
But if a lean manufacturer improve 50% only on non value added activities he will generate 44% extra value even workers and the machine efficiencies remain the same. Calculation would look like below
So what these results means. When a traditional manufacturer tries improving efficiencies of the processes he is working on the value addition processes and improving them. But the reality is in a conventional manufacturing system only a small amount of all the activities are used in real value addition. So the improvement on the entire system will be very little. But lean manufacturing looks at the bigger picture always. With very high percentage of non value added activities lean manufacturing can improve a system greatly even without increasing efficiencies in value addition process. This is not to say lean manufacturing doesn’t work on improving efficiencies of the workers and processes. But to say it has a greater potential beyond that. |
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Lean productivity Vs batch efficiency | All not Parts of your system can become lean | The lean profit formula |
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