Lean Manufacturing

How do Lean and Safety work together?

Lean manufacturing includes many initiatives, technologies and methods used to reduce waste, costs and complexity from manufacturing processes. The purpose of applying lean concepts is to achieve better and faster throughput at less waste and the related benefits thereof. There is one problem with the lean efforts, the safety concerns often get overlooked or removed all together and this creates greater risk. This does not have to be the case. Safety can be effectively included in the lean manufacturing effort to yield processes that are better, faster, less wasteful and safer. The challenge comes down to concurrently addressing safety and lean together.

The goals of lean manufacturing are to achieve throughput that is:

• better
• faster
• cheaper

More and more companies of all kinds and sizes have introduced lean manufacturing into their operations. Some processes include:

• 5-S
• Kanban
• Kaizen
• Value Stream Mapping

While the primary goals may be to decrease waste, increase quality and reduce costs; the companies, their management and their employees also find benefits from improved safety.

designsafe® focuses on the Value Stream Mapping aspect of lean manufacturing. The screen shot below shows how designsafe® uses the Mapping aspect in the software.

Click on the image for a larger screenshot.

Situations in which lean manufacturing has been applied include:

• Parts Changeover
• Assembly lines
• Transportation
• Piles of work in process
• Idle time

As lean manufacturing concepts have become more mainstream, there is also cause for alarm with the concepts not being applied correctly and safety problems have resulted. Some examples are:

• not replacing guards or safety devices that prevent access to points of operation
• modify or disable guards or safety devices to improve access or quality so the parts do not come in contact with the guard.
• modif guards and devices to provide operator a better view of area

Safety and lean manufacturing should not be viewed as having different goals. In fact, they share a very common goal of maximizing manufacturing throughput at the lowest risk and waste. If considered together early in the design stages of lean manufacturing, both safety and lean concerns can be managed effectively. If one or the other is not considered, a below par result will occur.

For more information on lean manufacturing...

B11.TR7 - Designing for Safer and Lean Manufacturing

Liker, J. (2004). The Toyota Way. McGraw Hill.

Ohno, T. (1988). Toyota Production System. Productivity Press.

Taubitz, M. (2005). The Jorney to Lean: Getting Started.

Womack, J.P., Jones, D.T. & Roos,D. (1990). The Machine that Changed the World. Harper Perennial.

Womack, J.P. & Jones, D.T. (1996). Lean Thinking - Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation. Simon & Schuster.