Optimizing material handling with lean
CASE STUDY – By streamlining its internal processes, an agribusiness company in Brazil managed to reduce its material handling cycle time by 75% and the associated costs by 66%.
Down with batching
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A common problem that practitioners trying to bring lean to services encounter is the difficulty to identify “the work” – whereas in manufacturing the product is in front of everyone’s eyes, in service organizations it is often hidden behind paperwork or a computer screen. Once the work is clearly visible, however, the opportunities for improvement are plentiful. To date, we have seen thousands of organizations striving to lean out the service they provide customers: from restaurants chains in the United States and China to a group of bakeries in Barcelona, from call centers to hotels, the application of lean services ideas can have an extraordinary impact on our economies. Especially if we consider that the service industry accounts for more than three-fifths of the global GDP and employs more than one-third of the global workforce.
Lean thinking is naturally a fit for the service industry, because of its focus on constantly delighting customers and on providing them with value-adding products."
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FeaturesJun 8, 2020
FEATURE – To speed up the issuance of insurance policies, a SulAmérica department decided to move away from big batches and start working in flow.
Lean thinking for more resilient supply chains
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FeaturesMay 4, 2020
FEATURE – The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed all the shortcomings of our current supply chains. Lean Thinking can make them more agile, aligned and adaptive.
Sorting out sourcing
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FeaturesFeb 20, 2020
FEATURE – The Sourcing team at insurance company SulAmérica tells us about how they were able to transform the process in their department in order to become more efficient in dealing with their workload.
Extracting waste from our process
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Case studiesJan 23, 2020
CASE STUDY – In a Brazilian insurance company, a team worked hard to streamline the revision of dental claims – a great example of Lean Thinking in an administrative process.
Bringing lean to the people
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string(1594) "Manufacturing is where the lean movement originated from. For their MIT research in the late 1980s (which resulted in the 1990 seminal book The Machine the Changed the World), Jim Womack and Dan Jones identified a set of principles and techniques that made Japanese carmakers far more productive than their Western competitors.
The superiority of the Toyota Production System is now a recognized fact (Toyota has been profitable every year but one, for half a century), which means that today most manufacturing organizations around the world practice lean manufacturing thinking to some extent. The prevalence of this alternative way of thinking and managing in the manufacturing sector often generates confusion in other industries, in which people’s first reaction to improvement attempts is the now proverbial “We don’t make cars. Lean is a manufacturing thing.”
When applied to manufacturing, lean tools like heijunka, SMED or Kanban cards allow for the optimization of production processes and the systematic elimination of waste (in its three incarnations of muda, muri and mura – respectively, non-value-adding work, overburden and unevenness). These happen by implementing the fundamental lean principles of pull and flow. However, it has now been proved that the principles characterizing lean manufacturing are universally applicable. They work in any sector and they apply to any kind of work – even though at times they require some adjustment."
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Case studiesDec 16, 2019
CASE STUDY – This article briefly outlines the different stages of the lean transformation at Mercedes Benz Brazil, as the company looked for the best approach to engage everyone in continuous improvement.
Daily management in construction
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string(1440) "The construction industry has a reputation for delays, bad quality and unsafe working conditions. This makes it a prime candidate for the implementation of lean principles and techniques. The idea of 'lean construction' has been around since the early 1990s, when a group of academics in California started to look at opportunities for the application of lean in the sector. One of the results of this early work was the introduction of the Last Planner System to better manage construction sites.
The lean construction movement soon spread to other parts of the world, starting with the UK - where it influenced a number of organizations and large projects, like the construction of St Pancras station in London. Large construction companies quickly took on lean management. Like in other industries, at the beginning the adoption of lean focused heavily on the application of tools, whereas more recently the strategic importance of lean management has been recognized by the industry.
Technology is providing new opportunities for the sector, with 3D and 4D software tools taking the lead. Technological advances, coupled with the adoption of solid improvement practices, like lean construction methodology, in the construction industry, means we can design and build better, safer and lasting buildings - also guaranteeing working infrastructure for our increasingly urban world."
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Case studiesDec 9, 2019
FEATURE – How lean daily management helped a Brazilian construction company to stabilize production in a tailing dam elevation project.
Our gemba walks in Brazil
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FeaturesOct 7, 2019
FEATURE – Last month, the Lean Global Network met in Brazil for its annual meeting. As part of it, we visited several amazing gembas. Three of our lean coaches reflect on what we learned.
Daily management in the ICU
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string(1608) "Lean thinking may have been born in Toyota in the 1950s and 1960s, but it wasn’t until after the year 2000 that a few hospitals began to explore its application to the healthcare industry (lean healthcare). These pioneering organizations came together to share their stories at the first Global Lean Healthcare Summit in the UK in 2007, which in turn triggered many more experiments around the world. Since then, interest has kept growing.
Some fifteen years on, we have hundreds of examples to learn from, from clinics and departments through to entire hospitals and even whole hospital systems. Not all early experiments succeeded, and we are still a long way from making lean a widely recognized way of working across the industry.
Healthcare providers around the world still face huge challenges, as ageing populations and unhealthy lifestyles boost the demand for healthcare faster than the growth of incomes and tax revenues from the middle classes. At the same time, the quality of care has not improved as much as the quality of other services in the economy, which is why more and more healthcare organizations are turning to lean.
Historically, lean healthcare ideas have been applied in large hospitals, but in the past few years we have started to see the philosophy adopted in earnest in many smaller organizations following a do-it-yourself approach that has generated many positive benefits. An impressive example is the Consorci Sanitari del Garraf near Barcelona."
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Case studiesAug 29, 2019
CASE STUDY – Effectively deploying and executing your strategy requires mastering quick follow-ups at different levels of the organization – in other words, Daily Management.