Emilio Ruiz Eguiluz Nájera A01011160 Manufacturing Strategies
Nestor Cifuentes Gutiérrez A01014302 Date due: 01/26/2011

Report 2

Lean Principles

Summary of the key concepts
Lean manufacturing implementation requires knowledge of the seven wastes (non value added activities like overproduction) which cause high costs of production that can be avoided. As well, lean requires many building blocks (like Pull system, Kanban and Work Cells), which sometimes need to be considered to be followed in sequence as you could get negative results if implemented out of order.
Benefits of lean are mentioned, broken down into three categories: Operational, Administrative and Strategic improvements.
Many companies have tried to achieve …ver más…

What did you learn? * 'Pull'. It means that nothing is done unless and until a downstream process requires it. * The single most effective mechanism for implementing lean production is adopting Just-in-Time, pull-from-demand flow.

Continuous Improvement Trio

Summary of the key concepts
Lean manufacturing is only one strategy to consider applying if you want to achieve world class quality and production, but joined together with Six Sigma and TOC (Theory of Constraints) it results in a way better improvement overall than each strategy by itself.

This strategy is called TLS, and it requires having measures and tracking of process indicators as key measurements to be studied. These measurements include warranty costs, on-time delivery, customer returns, inventory reduction, etc. It uses TOC as management philosophy as a tool for identifying the existing or potential constraints to achieve a goal. Lean’s 5S should be considered to bring order and discipline to the process, assist in sustaining gains achieved and to promote continuous improvement as a way of work life. Finally to pursue perfection, Six Sigma should be used as a “design – measure – analyze – improve – control” improvement model, enabling workers to identify and isolate sources of process deviation and systematically minimize or remove those variations.

Analytical Critic
Lean principles can make a company improve over time, but considering the adding of other