What organizational and communications changes are needed to implement lean manufacturing?
KG: There needs to be a commitment from the top of the organization that it’s something they’re going to do. Lean manufacturing is a philosophy of what you do every day. Communications really needs to facilitate involvement. It’s a system of processes. You learn to understand, accept and appreciate solving problems. It gives you something to fix like using the five whys or asking why five times to get down to the root cause. You identify opportunities for continuous improvement. MM: What results are reasonable to expect from lean manufacturing? KG: Let me give a simple example. We were looking at our shipping process with UPS and FedEx. We took some measurements, errors, how much distance he walked in a day and came up with 10 miles. What kind of improvement can we get here? We got that down to 200 yards walked in a day. Errors went from 70 to 15 in a month by implementing a one-piece flow system. By looking at the process and eliminating opportunities for errors, forcing information f
