Logistics, History, and Principles of LEAN Manufacturing Approach

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LEAN Logistics

History and Principles of LEAN

In the mid 1950s Taiichi Ohno started developing the methodology and principles of the Lean Manufacturing Approach in the form of the Toyota Production System (TPS) and to implement it at Toyota in the automobile assembly line production, which at that time was extremely unprogressive and of inferior quality.

The essential principle of the LEAN Manufacturing Approach is the implementation of the workflow in which all work sequences throughout all corporate functions are standardized and continuously optimized – holistically integrated without department, division or country boundaries.

The Four Basic Rules of LEAN

1. All work must be standardized to a high degree in terms of content, workflow and timing.

2. All customer and vendor relationships (external and internal) have to be direct, and there must be a clear yes/no procedure.

3. The pathway for every product and service has to be simple and direct.

4. All improvements have to be carried out in accordance with the standardized methodology and under the supervision of the “teacher” (Sensei) on the lowest possible organizational level.

Lean first goal is to reduce the total logistics costs by increasing the speed as well as the flow of material and information. Waste and variation needs to be taken out from the SupplyChain.

Then the second goal is visualize where the waste is and allocate resources where the biggest opportunities for improvements are, so we can get the most out of them.

The third and also very important objective is to improve the customer delivery performance while also reducing the total logistics costs. For achieving this goal it is very important to apply lean tools and systemic improvement m...

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...d processes are more inefficient. The main issue is that efficiency is no normally measure or not measure correctly. Further, other logistic processes are not analyzed and controlled like reverse logistics for returnable packaging, etc. Purchasing is focus toward getting the cheapest company by unit base and does not take into consideration the efficiency of the operation. Logistics companies run at low efficiency (cube and weight).Normally, systems are much disintegrated

.

Excels are used for execution and kanban sizing and standard processes are not implemented to maintain these pull systems. MRP is still driving the supply part and forecast information for suppliers have a lot of variation due to wrong information and bull whip effects (“Garbage in garbage out2). The weakest links need to be identified and improve in order to strength the whole supply chain.

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