Professor Daniel T Jones, director of the
Lean Enterprise Research Centre and author of leading
seminal works on lean operating practice, defines operating
practice, current and future. His theme is manufacturing our
future - you must untangle your processes. Companies will have
to reorganise how they operate their production processes to
reduce lead-time, stock and work in progress, to release floor
space and working capital, and reduce head count and overhead.
The result will be large reductions in operating costs.
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Over twenty years, Taiichi Ohno at Toyota
overcame the obstacles to producing a variety of products in
process sequence. Their business system is based on compressing
time, with near perfect capability, and they build only to
order. It still represents the most complete example of process
thinking. But thirty years later the average UK manufacturer
still does not understand its benefits.
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The automotive supply sector leads in these
practices. Since the mid-70s, inventory turns have more than
doubled in this sector. But elsewhere in manufacturing during
the same period, typical companies are stagnating at around 7-8
a year. As a direct consequence, these companies’ operating
costs are too high.
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