Benefits of Lean Manufacturing

Lean manufacturing is both a philosophy and a set of business improvement tools that have been well proven over many years. It is not just a method to reduce waste from your processes as promoted by some consultants and websites.
Lean is about value, providing your customer what he wants, the actual features and services that he really wants from your company. Lean is about making that value flow from raw materials to the customer, lean is about making that value flow at the pull of the customer, only producing what the customer wants. Lean is about continually striving for perfection in everything that you do.
Lean is also about respect for you employees and their involvement in continual improvement of every aspect of your business.
I hope the above summary helps, look at What is lean manufacturing , a simple explanation.
for more information.

You need an understanding of the history of lean manufacturing if you are going to be able to fully understand how the tools and ideas behind lean have come about and the issues that they were to tackle.
Lean starts long before Toyota, back even before Ford's production line, lean has a very long and varied history including the works of Taylor, Gilbreth, Juran, Deming and Shewhart to name just a few. Toyota took their teachings and combined it with their drive to dominate the automotive industry and created what we know as the Toyota Production System (TPS).
Many companies tried to copy the Japanese in the early 1980s, bringing over individual tools and ideas that had limited success without being implemented as part of the whole lean philosophy. Not until 1990 with the publication of "The Machine that Changed The World" by Womack and Jones did the term Lean Manufacturing become coined and people began to understand the overall aims of Lean.

LEAN MANUFACTURING has been around for many years so there are many documented studies and summaries of its performance. The reasons that it has been around for so long is because it is so effective. It is also aimed at improving measurable business performance so its impact can be seen clearly in the bottom line of your business.

The benefits that can be attributed to lean, whether in a manufacturing or a service industry are many;

Improved Customer Service; delivering exactly what the customer wants when they want it.
Improved Productivity; Improvements in throughput and value add per person.
Quality; Reductions in defects and rework.
Innovation; staff are fully involved so improved morale and participation in the business
Reduced Waste; Less transport, moving, waiting, space, and physical waste.
Improved Lead Times; Business able to respond quicker, quicker set ups, fewer delays.
Improved Stock Turns; Less work in progress and Inventory, so less capital tied up.

All of the above can significantly impact the profitability of your business, in some ways that a figure can be placed on the saving immediately such as reduction in defects and others that are less tangible such as customers gained / not lost through being able to offer a shorter lead time.

The above comments however are purely anecdotal, you will want some actual credible facts and figures and not just some wish list repeated from a consultancies sales pitch. Below I will give you some figures from the Manufacturing Advisory Service (MAS), a UK initiative sponsored through the Department of Trade and Industry to help improve UK manufacturing. These figures are average results from many hundreds of projects that have been run all over the UK for the last eight years, not just one or two implementations.

PRODUCTIVITY +25%
SCRAP -26%
SPACE -33%
DELIVERY +26%
STOCK TURNS +33%
OEE +45%

OEE is a measure that combines a machines availability, performance and quality output.

The above figures are very impressive when you consider that these are average figures over so many projects, most of these projects only being one or two weeks long. How would your business benefit if you could increase productivity by 25%?

One of the things that is missing in the figures from the MAS is that of lead time, lean can have a major impact on your businesses lead time, many of the projects that I was involved in reduced lead times from several weeks to just 2 or 3 days! The best reduction was a project to reduce lead time for simple design changes, we reduced the time from an average of 13 weeks to 1 hour!

If you want to gain these benefits then you need to learn how to implement lean manufacturing , then implement what you learn with a good consultant or a specifically hired expert with significant lean knowledge. Or you can wait until your competitors do, then it may be too late.