Experience of Businesses with Lean Manufacturing: Implications for Your Company
Lean Manufacturing continues to interest Polish manufacturers, and many of them try implementation to optimize production. Like with any other major change in an organization, a number of organizational and technical issues occur during implementation, not to mention employee resistance.
Our work with manufacturing businesses that adopted Lean Manufacturing in Poland also revealed that many fail to ensure continuous improvement; in fact, there are numerous reasons why implementation issues occur, and identifying them is critical to sustaining Lean wins.
Recently, we’ve come across a study that illustrated these issues and supported our assumptions about how Lean Manufacturing should be implemented.
The Study
So, the study that we found so interesting was completed by researchers from Wroclaw University of Technology and Czestochowa University of Technology. The main aim pursued by them was the analysis of problems that occur during the implementation of Lean Manufacturing approaches, including but not limited to:
- Just in Time
- Kanban
- Work Standardization
- Value Stream Mapping
- 5S audit
- Kaizen
- Visual management.
To get the input, the researchers surveyed 248 employees in 29 manufacturing businesses from Wroclaw and its surroundings. The businesses surveyed in the study manufactured products for food, electrical, clothing, chemistry, and electronics sectors.
In the sample:
- 11 businesses have been implementing Lean for 7 years,
- 16 businesses for between 2 and 6 years,
- 2 enterprises for less than 2 years.
According to the surveyed employees, the most common reason why their organization has chosen to implement Lean was to reduce waste in manufacturing processes (72 percent). See the complete list of reasons in Figure 1 below.
As you can see, “improving production efficiency” and “cost reduction” were among other causes for implementing Lean.
It was rather surprising to discover that 38 percent of the surveyed said that their company implemented Lean to meet requirements from the customer. Also, 27 percent said that the strategy was adopted because of “market requirements.”
This suggests that Lean Manufacturing will be adopted by more businesses in Poland in the next few years, as more customers impose more complex quality and time requirements.
Employee Reactions to Lean Manufacturing Implementation
Employee resistance to changes and the introduction of Lean approaches is one of the most common challenges faced by businesses. This was the case described by employees in the study as well.
Here are their main reactions.
Evidently, only 13 percent of employees reacted positively (they felt “satisfaction” or “curiosity”). The rest reported resisting the changes, feeling a threat, criticising the new strategy, or even a complete indifference.
These reactions suggest one critical finding:
The businesses failed to generate a high employee involvement in Lean Manufacturing projects, which is an essential requirement for improving productivity and efficiency of production processes.
If employees aren’t motivated and encouraged to try Lean methods, chances are high that an organization will fail to optimize processes and cut costs.
All About Lean has a good guide to employee motivation and Lean implementation for you if you’d like to explore this topic.
Problems that Occurred during Lean Manufacturing Implementation
The complete list of problems identified by employees of manufacturing businesses in Wroclaw is shown in table 1.
Improper communication was the most frequent cause of problems, followed by a lack of support from top managers and pressure from business owners to meet quality demands and deadlines.
When asked about the reasons for insufficient effects of Lean on production performance and efficiency, most respondents selected a lack of self-discipline (69 percent) and return to old habits (67 percent).
The commitment of the management to the success of implementation and proper control over Lean projects could reduce the impact of these problems.
Takeaways
The study has a number of important takeaways for production businesses. If you’re planning or currently implementing Lean Manufacturing at your organization, you’ll find them interesting.
- Consider Lean manufacturing as a strategy to meet market and customer requirements. In the study, for example, 38 percent of employees said their businesses employed this approach.
- Educate your workforce about the benefits of Lean Manufacturing implementation. More than 70 percent of employees reacted negatively to changes in the study.
- Lean is a widely used tool to improve production efficiency and reduce the seven manufacturing wastes among Polish businesses
- Proper communication and manager commitment is required to improve the success rate of Lean Manufacturing projects
- Sufficient control over the implementation can reduce the problem of a lack of self-discipline and return to old habits.
Our work with manufacturing businesses in other areas of Poland also suggests similar problems during implementation. To help managers to reduce the impact of many of these problems, they have to show their commitment to success and ensure continuous control over implementation.
In our experience, production managers have found that tracking moving assets involved in production — employees, tugger trains, forklifts, WIP, inventory, etc. — is an effective method to achieve Lean goals such as waste reduction and reduce the impact of common implementation problems.
A real-time location system (RTLS) is a tool that delivers quality tracking needed to meet these goals. If you’d like to know more, check out how manufacturing businesses can use RTLS to:
