Using Lean Scheduling Principles to Enhance Work Flow

The Lean Management Philosophy has become a standard for production management worldwide, thanks to its focus on efficiency, speed, safety and cost reduction. In short, Lean addresses the major issues that make an operation lose money or fail to achieve profit and quality potentials:

• Bottlenecks and Slowdowns: Anything that gets in the way of a smooth, efficient work flow.
• Waste: This includes waste of materials and time.
• Site Condition: A sloppy, cluttered work site is distracting, wastes time and can contribute to time wasting accidents and equipment breakdown.
• Sustainability: By establishing standardized procedures and effective lines of communications, a Lean system continues to improve over time.

The problem many people run into after implementation Lean is how to engage with day to day operations. It's one thing to create a lean, smooth, effective production process. It's another to make it work with tight production schedules.

Scheduling Principles:

At Uttana.com, you can work with an online course that helps you to integrate your Lean methodologies with a working production schedule. Keep in mind that tight scheduling is an integral part of the Lean philosophy.This course on Scheduling Principles will help you to:

• Achieve the goal of just in time delivery, both with your suppliers and with your customers.
• Help you to level and load balance production to maximize efficiency and keep your customers happy.
• Provide you with techniques for forecasting that will help insure that you are ahead of the demand, not behind the eight ball.

Seasonal demands and slumps, dips and spikes in the economy, problems with your supply chain and changes in customer demand and expectation all contribute to scheduling difficulties which, if not anticipated and prepared for, can throw a wrench in your operation, defeating the purpose of Lean.

What you will learn:

With this course, you will learn how to:

• Techniques for load balancing and leveling your production to make sure that your resources are used effectively. It doesn't do much good if some lines are idle while others are running hot.

• An introduction to:

◦     Current forecasting methods and techniques

◦     How to manage external and internal factors that can affect forecasting

◦     Using visualizing techniques to make forecasting more effective and far reaching.

• How to interpret and apply forecasting data to the actual operation in your lines. It's one thing to get the information. It's another to use it effectively.
• Balancing Demand and Capacity. You know what you can produce. You should know what your customers expect. The trick is how to keep these two elements in balance.
• Using the Pull system to control material and product flow. This is a localized implementation of the Just in Time principle that helps to minimize stored materials and components and makes sure that materials are only moved when they will be needed.

Scheduling has always been and will continue to be a critical and demanding element of any production system. By using the techniques provided by Scheduling Principles course, you will be able to integrate your scheduling efforts with your existing Lean methodologies, creating an even more effective overall system than you had before.

Source : articlesbase.com