Managing Production with Lean Production System

Managing production is one of the key result areas of the Production, Planning and Control (PPC) department. It has to appropriately plan & control the production process to ensure that material & information flows seamlessly along the stages to achieve customer satisfaction.

Managing production also means getting the right inputs from product design, product manufacturing, quality control, purchase of materials, resource utilization happens to utilize capacity and meet the organizational goals.

In lean thinking, managing production is categorized by four M’s; Men, Material, Machine & Method.

Men: Having a skill workforce is critical to producing quality products and maintaining costs. Therefore, determining apt manpower for managing production is to be primarily strategically synchronized in the demand planning to maintain the right workforce.

Materials: includes the management of flow processes—both materials and information. Many organizations face problems in managing RM, WIP, FG, Packing & general inventories.

Inventory control is the center of important aspect of production management since it accounts to, in most cases, more than 50% of the product cost. PPC department plan and control the process of production so that the inventory can moves smoothly along all the workstations at required rate to meet cost and quality objectives.

Machines: first selecting the equipment and technology to be used in the manufacturing of the product or service and then planning and controlling the methods and procedures for their use.

The effective utilization of machinery and equipment depends on the extent to which it is kept in optimum running condition, and the degree to which it can be mechanically or electronically controlled.

Methods: due to the complexity in the product development process, many organizations adopt different methods to manage the production system with technologies like MRP, ERP, SAP. The workforce these days are very diversified and has both people from older generation, millennials as well as from far off places and corporate experience, so a gap exists in the overall understanding for managing production. Getting the product(s) ready becomes a challenge for organizations and a nightmare for the customers.

PPC department too has a very important role in production planning ie to help setting up of a production site, facilitating production needs, demand planning and capacity planning, controlling the production workflow. Production planning comprise the following activities:

• Determine the required product mix and factory load.

• Achieving the production requirement within available resources.

• Scheduling and completing the production orders as per the plan.

How Vedzen will help you to manage production?

Some time back, my Guru, Mr. Anup Gandhi, shared a small story of about where the organization was unable to managing production and productivity. The owner of the organization then announced a challenge, that ‘the operator who achieves the target will be rewarded. All the staff tried their best & one operator achieved the target and he was awarded with a gift. Everyone was impressed by his performance, but Mr. Gandhi asked a simple question, “did we achieve the line targets or the overall production?” The answer was, “No”. Then he explained that, improving the productivity of one work station will never benefit until it was a bottleneck. Such kind of local improvement creates bigger problems.

In Lean Manufacturing, improving the productivity of one work-station & producing more than what is required for next work-station is a waste of overproduction. To overcome this challenge a pull system is to be developed to ensure continuous material & information flows seamlessly along the stages to achieve customer satisfaction.

When we talk about creating a lean production system, it starts with identifying & eliminating the operational waste within organization to increase value addition.

Our lean consultants conduct lean assessments on aspects like capacity utilization, quality, bottleneck, inventory management, and customer satisfaction & employee involvement.

We, as lean consultants, train your people and handhold you in developing a lean production system to achieve operational KPI’s of the organization and create a great place to work.

Connect with us at info@vedzen.com for training & implementation of lean production system

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