The Apparel Industry seems to be smitten by Lean. Either we can say that all initiatives are converging towards Lean or Lean initiatives have broadened their scope to include all efficiency improvement techniques. It all started with elimination of waste, single piece flow in sewing floor, U-shaped face-to-face layout in sewing floor, 5S implementation in production floor, inventory reduction program by Kanban implementation, value stream mapping for value-added and non-value-added work identification and minimization of latter, modular manufacturing, etc. all of which are now initiatives within the Lean concept. While Lean understanding from user’s point of view is sufficient, it is the prioritised need and appropriate choice of tools that makes any lean journey fruitful. Although the essence is waste reduction, the ways and means will change based on area of usage. Jayanta Roy, an industry expert with 10 years’ experience in production, analyses the critical factors for successful implementation of Lean.
Lean manufacturing is the flavour of the season. Almost everyone has heard about the same and probably few of them are attempting to implement Lean through consultants. It’s a philosophy that outlines multi-dimensional approaches to reduction of waste. It can be applied in day-to-day operations, strategy, customer satisfaction, manpower training and many other places. As someone from Lean group puts it, “For Lean to be successful, it should be a part of their life”. In business, cost, selling price and profit are three important parameters. Since profit and the buyer selling price cannot be changed, cost is the only variable that can be increased or decreased. How can the factory control the manufacturing cost in the absence of standards? Therefore, these days buyers, looking to march ahead, are requesting the factories to transform their manufacturing facility to ‘Lean Structure’.
[bleft]The softer side of implementing Lean is all about creating the need for change…, shaking people out of their comfort zone; this requires commitment from top management and strategic changes for successful implementation.[/bleft]
Going by the Wikipedia definition, “Lean” is a production practice that targets elimination of waste that does not create value for the end-customer. It is the set of “tools” like Value Stream Mapping, 5S, Kanban (pull systems), and Poka-Yoke that assits in the identification and steady elimination of waste (muda).
Key principles of Lean manufacturing
Focus on product value (meaning concentrating on value-added activities which customers are willing to pay for); Elimination of waste (identifying and eliminating/reducing 7 categories of waste); Continuous improvement and standardization (Kaizen, this means continuously seeking better method of working; once a method is standardized, look for further betterment possibility, and so on); Driven by customer need (customer centric approach, in terms of quality, delivery (rate of production), service); and Culture of change (very similar to Kaizen, instil the culture of change, make people drivers of change).
Commonly used Lean tools
• Value Stream Mapping
VSM serves as a starting point to help management, engineers, production associates, schedulers, suppliers and customers recognize waste and identify its causes. It involves physically mapping the factory’s “current state” while also focusing on where the factory wants to be, or its “future state”. The goal is to create a blueprint upon which future process and lead-time shortening strategies can be built.
• Kaizen for the Shop Floor
In Japanese, Kaizen means the Zen of taking something apart in order to make it better. As a workplace quality strategy, Kaizen has become synonymous with the concept of continuous improvement. It comprises of tools and methodologies to be followed to ensure that desired improvements are attained and subsequent changes sustained.
• One-Point Flow
One-Point Flow refers to the continuous connection of a factory’s complete processes from dock-to-dock for optimum results. Unnecessary processes – excessive handling and manipulation – add to costs and increased lead times, resulting in overproduction and inefficient use of workers and space. Lesser the operations in a factory, the lesser will be the waste, and easier it will be to balance the factory flow.
• Modular Manufacturing and One-Piece Flow
One-Piece Flow refers to producing one unit at a time as opposed to large lots and is attained through Modular Manufacturing where workers and equipments are arranged in U-shaped assembly cells instead of traditional production lines.
• Visual Control & Point-of-Use Systems
In order to respond quickly to market place demands with flexible production setups and zero defect standards, managers and workers alike must be able to realize at a glance what is going on in their factories.
Visual control systems bring total alignment to common objectives and will help everyone in the factory to become involved in monitoring, and actively supporting corporate objectives throughout the manufacturing process.
• 5S Workplace Organization for Workers
The benefits of Lean manufacturing cannot be fully realized in a workplace that is cluttered, disorganized or dirty. 5S is a target list of activities promoting organization and efficiency in the workplace and stands for Sorting, Straightening, Shining, Standardizing
and Sustaining.
• Poka-Yoke (error proofing)
An improvement strategy that is targeted at eliminating defects, errors, and equipment abnormalities in production processes before they occur.
• Standardization
It is the process of defining the best way to get a job done in the amount of time available while ensuring the job is done right the first time, every time. It is a precise description of each work activity, specifying cycle time, takt time, the work sequence of specific tasks and the minimum inventory of parts in hand needed to conduct the activity.
To accomplish the five key principles, initiative and commitment of people is also required, along with the tools. It is the human resource that ultimately applies the rules and tools.
Softer Side in Lean
The softer side of implementing Lean is all about creating the need for change…, shaking people out of their comfort zone; this requires commitment from top management and strategic changes for successful implementation. While tool provides the logic and/or methodology of any step, the urge to implement comes from people. Unless the people involved believe in the process, the change will not happen.
Leadership Vision: It is critical to ask the leadership a fundamental question – Is he willing to take tough decisions if the need arises and choose long-term goals over short-term benefits? Lean should not be taken as short-term cost-cutting strategy, but should be embraced as a way of doing business. Garment manufacturing by its nature is a labour-intensive industry, therefore investing in people and processes will pave a long way.
Measuring KPI (Key Performance Indicators)
People performance based on what for they are measured and how often they are measured. Key KPI drivers of Lean behaviours include:
Safety: How safe is the workplace? How serious are we about employee safety and even if so, do we have a good understanding for reducing injuries?
A safety calendar prominently displayed and updated regularly and transparently on a daily basis by team leaders or supervisors to track days of safe working, near misses, minor injuries and major injuries helps to educate everyone, show management concern and build an atmosphere of trust.
[bleft]Part-1 of the 4 parts series on Lean Production Technique and Training
In this first part we will discuss what is Lean, what are the common tools and softer side of Lean implementation. In the second part we will discuss where and how 5S and Kanban are used for reduction of waste. The third part will discuss where and how Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), Value Stream Mapping (VSM) and Poka-Yoke are used. In the concluding part of this series we will discuss how a game-based training can be used for understanding the concepts in simpler manner. [/bleft]
Quality: Rework requires additional resources contributing to additional cost, eating up into profitability. Focusing on Right First Time (RFT) across the entire value stream and improving on it will shorten throughput time and free up resources. An organization with a culture of doing Root Cause Analysis and fixing problems involving people will go a long way in improving productivity and profitability. Two of the measures indicating quality are – First Pass Yield and Cost of Rejection.
Delivery: Maintaining fewer inventories will shorten the throughput time and also bring problems to the surface much more quickly, compelling to fix them. If done properly and consistently in a methodical manner, it will start to show benefit a mere 25% improvement in throughput time in a month would mean that earlier where an order used to take 30 days can now be completed in 22.5 days. It means that the company can take more orders for the balance 7.5 days and can improve its turnover ratio thereby improving its cash flow situation.
Cost: As opposed to traditional way of measuring cost through standard costing, where the philosophy is that profit comes from full utilization of resources and hence measurements are based on labour efficiency and machine utilization, which is a driving behaviour to produce more, leading to increase in inventory. It is for this imperative reason that value stream costing is adopted for decision making to sustain the Lean culture.
One perspective of value stream costing is that profits come from maximizing flow on pull from customers, which is a driver to eliminate inventory. Imagine what a company could do by reducing an inventory pile up from 15 days to 2 days in terms of people, delivery time, and floor space and so on.
One of the ways of calculating cost is cost per unit. However, the most important thing is that cost per unit needs to be calculated from a value stream perspective and not from a generic point of view. What this means is that cost per unit should not be considered in isolation without taking throughput time into account and the benefits accrued out of it. It is possible that cost per unit may go up by using additional manpower to improve the flow which might also reduce the defects simultaneously, considerably improving the throughput time, resulting in available time at our disposal although the improvement has happened in terms of turning out the goods faster and better, but as per standard accounting the cost per unit has increased and hence improvement has not happened.
Morale: If the employees’ morale is high, they would present themselves for the job regularly. Hence a good measure for ascertaining employee morale is employee attrition & absenteeism percentage and employee satisfaction survey.
Gemba Walks: How much is the value stream manager in touch with the actual work processes? Does he spend quality time at the place of actual value creation…? Gemba walks are about ‘Management by Walking Around’ and not to intimidate but help the workers. It is essential for value stream managers to spend as much as 20% of his daily working time (could be on an hourly basis) on the shop floor, observing the process, asking questions about the processes, interacting with people and doing process conformity to collect a lot of valuable inputs.
Standardisation and Process Stability: One of the pre-requisites for Lean practices to sustain is process standardisation and process stability. Process standardisation does not mean that improvements cannot happen anymore, but what it means is that processes should not be changed very frequently. If a better method exists then standardise it and then improve on it and after the improvement has happened, again standardise it and so on.
Employee Involvement: Leadership vision alone is not enough to make an effective change in culture if employee support is not there. To make an effective change in culture and more importantly to sustain it, an open and participative style of management is needed, where both operators and staff can substantially contribute and learn from each other rather than controlling or following a bureaucratic style of management. The management working to engage the operators in problem solving make them a part of the decision making process also. Recognition, after successful completion of improvement projects, tied to specific goals should be duly awarded.
One of the most crucial things is that the operators should never feel threatened about losing jobs arising out of their improvement efforts indicating a reduction in the number of headcounts, but rather they should feel proud about implementing the findings with proper support. Some means of taking care of the excess resources could be to let natural attrition take care of it, look at the possibility of bringing back the outsourced jobs in-house if any, and look at the possibility of starting a new line if the market demand exists.
Human Resource Policies: Organizations do not change… people do. One of the most critical challenges in implementing Lean is the human factor as experts believe that tools constitute only 20% and the other 80% is culture related. Organizations are compartmentalized – someone is responsible for production, someone is responsible for quality, someone else is responsible for sales, and so on with each of the functional heads responsible only for their own department metrics. In such a situation it so happens that every ‘function’ tries to perform its best for its own metrics, resulting in some of the metrics of some function outperforming others causing conflicting and unbalanced situations from a value stream perspective, e.g. a production functional head will only be concerned about his utilization percentage without being bothered about the time of cash flow coming in for the goods he is making. Similarly, a person responsible for purchase might be more biased towards reducing cost of materials rather than the specified quality. Because of this approach the problem in the system remains from low productivity, delayed lead times to more utilization of resources due to poor quality of materials.
Hence what is required is de-compartmentalization or breaking down of the barriers between various departments or functions and forming a cross functional team aligned with common goals and objectives, from top to bottom. One of the ways of doing this is through ‘Hoshin Kanri’.
Strategic HR policies need to be put into place catering to different levels. Though employee recognition without monetary terms continues to be one of the biggest motivating factor, performance reward systems needs to be put into place at the operator’s level for learning new skills or cross training, imperative of Lean manufacturing.
Formal Training and Mentoring: Companies committed to change the culture and implement Lean practices should preferably use the experience of someone from outside the organization, experienced mentor along with internal change agents and strong leadership skills is necessary to initiate the transformation process.
