By Mike Gilchrist, P. I.

The term Lean as used within the manufacturing process means the elimination of waste within the various processes that are involved while producing a product. The seven wastes are:

• Defects - errors and rework
• Excess Inventory - both work in process and finished stores
• Excess Processing - steps with no value to product or service
• Waiting - unproductive time
• Motion - movement of people
• Transportation - movement of information and materials, internally and externally
• Overproduction - working faster than required by the next step

An organization that embarks on a Lean Journey needs to consider and embrace the following:

• Secure backing from the top - Planning meetings held by upper management are essential for success. Upper management needs to set the course
• Roll up your shirtsleeves - Being involved with Lean Events can be a dirty experience with lots of hard work, so get up and get into it.
• Communicate and educate - Set up an agenda to be a part of the monthly communication meeting. Buy training videos, books and consultant time to help train the workforce.
• Apply metrics - Develop a scorecard that employs the key measures that relate to business performance
• Let your customers know what you are doing - Let your customers know that you are taking steps to improve product delivery performance, and end quality of your product. Invite your customers to participate, and also participate in your customer's Lean Journey
• Get the Faith - Practice what you preach. Firmly insist that all the management team is serious about the effort. Display the benefits of the effort and others will get the faith
• Prepare for the long haul - The Lean Journey is never ending; it is a way of life. After several years of determined hard work the effort will become perpetual and have its own natural energy. People will learn to eliminate wasteful habits on their own and never lose focus

We at Bauer have started on the Lean Journey. It started in April 2008 with a concise plan that was developed by upper management. We have approached the Lean Journey in a different way than that of most companies.

We have some of the same techniques in place such as the 5S events and the Value Stream events,but where we are different is that the entire process has been engineered toward an overall system, a system that we call the Lean Enterprise System.

We have modeled our approach to emulate most of the attributes that the Supplier Excellence Alliance uses. Our top management met on several occasions to establish company objectives, a way to baseline our status (where we were) on each objective, then setting our goals, or where we want to be on each objective. It's important to remember that where we want to be is higher than where we need to be to run a successful business. Each one of our objectives have stretch goals that go beyond our actual needs for the business. Next we designed a Balanced Scorecard that incorporated these objectives showing our baselines and our goals in an easy to read format that all employees' understand. This Balanced Scorecard is now our Company Dashboard, and is updated on a monthly basis, and presented to the entire company at our monthly meetings.

Each Lean Event, no matter what, is linked to the improvement of at least one of our objectives. This is a difference that we hold when compared with other companies that just do Lean Events for the sake of doing Lean Events. Many companies feel that if they just do a bunch of Lean Events, their company will get better and they will reap the harvest. This may be true to a small degree, now compare this methodology to a company like ours that has done the planning and is measuring their objectives and is only performing events that relate to these objectives. We will do just as many events as the other companies, but we have a real plan, one that can be measured.

Over the last six months we have completed four events and have plans for four more events that are all aimed at improving our Balanced Scorecard. Our goal is to have at least eight events per year. To date we have implemented nearly 100 improvement items from these four events. This has helped our Balanced Scorecard measurements improve 25% above the baseline where we started taking measurements. That's right, we are already 25% of the way to fulfilling 100% of the objectives that were established earlier this year.

Part of our Balance Scordcard is feedback from our customers through the Customer Satisfaction Survey. The survey allows us to get input directly from you, our customers, that tells us what we are doing well and where we need improvement. If you have recently received a product from us and have not filled out a survey, contact us at inforequest@bauerct.com to get a survey form.