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Lean Goals

Note that the following text is taken from Wikipedia on Lean Manufacturing.

The four goals of Lean manufacturing systems are to

• Improve quality: In order to stay competitive in today’s marketplace, a company must understand its customers' wants and needs and design processes to meet their expectations and requirements.
• Eliminate waste: Waste is any activity that consumes time, resources, or space but does not add any value to the product or service. There are seven types of waste:
• Reduce time: Reducing the time it takes to finish an activity from start to finish is one of the most effective ways to eliminate waste and lower costs.
• Reduce total costs: To minimize cost, a company must produce only to customer demand. Overproduction increases a company’s inventory costs due to storage needs.

Steps to achieve lean systems

The following steps should be implemented in order to create the ideal lean system:

• Design a simple manufacturing system
• Recognize that there is always room for improvement
• Continuously improve the lean manufacturing system design

Continuous Improvement

This last bullet is the motivation for creating experiments. Also see Continuous Improvement on Wikipedia.

An experiment is the adaptation of an existing process with the goal of improving that process. As we experiment with processes, we should record the new experiment in pages here. That way, others will understand how to execute the new experimental process and we will have a record of what worked and what did not.

Another need in experiments is metrics. It is ideal to measure whether an experiment has had quantifiable positive results.

This last statement is both a TBD for Brian to put some best practices here on how we measure improvements, but is also a request of you to think of ways that your experiments can be measured.

Process and Policy Pages

When you create a new experiment, please create a new page for that experiment. Our model is to create a page under the existing process, called Experiment. In that page, please describe the process, as you would in any other process page. Then, update the table Launchpad Processes Pages , by putting your Experiment link in the appropriate side of the table.

Once an experiment has been approved as a Standard process, please move the contents of the Experiment page to the existing process page.

Improvements

Please record and improvements or comments below...