Lean Manufacturing in the Steel Castings Industry

by Billy Newman

Lean Manufacturing Definition: Lean manufacturing or lean production, which is often known simply as "Lean", is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. In a more basic term, More value with less work. Lean manufacturing is a generic process management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System (TPS) (hence the term Toyotism is also prevalent) and identified as "Lean" only in the 1990s. It is renowned for its focus on reduction of the original Toyota seven wastes in order to improve overall customer value, but there are varying perspectives on how this is best achieved. The steady growth of Toyota, from a small company to the world's largest automaker has focused attention on how it has achieved this.

Lean manufacturing is a variation on the theme of efficiency; it is a present-day instance of the larger recurring theme in human life of increasing efficiency, decreasing waste, and using empirical methods to decide what matters, rather than uncritically accepting pre-existing ideas of what matters. Thus it is a chapter in the larger narrative that also includes, for example, the folk wisdom of thrift, time and motion study, Taylorism, the Efficiency Movement, and Fordism. Lean manufacturing is often seen, with the benefit of hindsight, as a progression from, or a better attempt at the same goal of, earlier efficiency efforts, that is, picking up where earlier leaders like Taylor or Ford left off, and learning from their mistakes.

Lean Manufacturing focuses on two main points, reduction of through-put time and elimination of waste. Through-put can be described as the time it takes an order to be received until it is on the shipping dock. Elimination of waste can be seen in several different areas. The Seven Wastes are: 1) Motion; any wasted motion to pick up or stack, walk and/or lack of direction or access, 2) Over-production; labor needed to process more than is needed, 3) Transport; multiple locations for the same information and/or wasted effort to transport work, 4) Inventory; maintaining excess inventory of raw materials, work in process, and/or finished goods, along with outdated or obsolete information, 5) Processing; doing more work than is necessary, 6) Waiting; any non-work time, and 7) Defects; everything required to rework or repair form.

For the Steel Castings Division of Spokane Industries, lean manufacturing is the single most effective strategy that will allow us to improve our quality while reducing our overall costs. In this commitment to Lean, we started with 6S, which is an acronym composed of Safety, Sort, Simplify, Shine, Standardize and Sustain.

Initiating the 6S practices made sense for a number of reasons. It was obvious the old way of approaching business practices was outdated. With obvious waste all around us it was easy to see that our production levels had plateaued, but the culture of the employees was not such that change would happen on its own. There was a veteran work force that had been doing it the same way for years, and they werent about to change, because in their view it wasnt broken. The visible change needed was provided by 6S to help jumpstart a revamped culture throughout the foundry.

We broke the foundry down into 10 sections and began implementing 6S. In each section we did an introduction class on 6S and Lean manufacturing, basically subscribing to a train-do model. Each member would actively participate in a kaizen event within a week of the class. In some cases we did the same section multiple times in order to achieve the desired results. At least one event was participated in by every foundry employee.

An additional step of our Lean journey began with the understanding of Autonomous Maintenance. Autonomous maintenance is the initial standard in Total Productive Maintenance or TPM. TPM is a proactive approach that essentially looks to reduce inventory (spare parts) and catastrophic failures by preventative measures.

As we proceed, we will continue our 6S and autonomous maintenance efforts while we perform Value Stream Mapping (VSM) of our processes. VSM is the series of processes that directly create value for the external customer by efficiently streamlining our work flows. We will do this to identify safety concerns, waste, bottlenecks, and communication breakdowns.

Tyrus Tenold, President of Foundry Operations for Spokane Industries, states, "To this point, a growing asset to Spokane Steel Castings are our Lean Manufacturing practices. As the culture continues to change, we implement new ideas on a regular basis. We have fully embraced Lean Manufacturing and we now look forward to seeing continuous improvements for the mutual benefits of customers and our ourselves."