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Lean management makes it possible to reduce excess inventories, minimize waiting times and errors, eliminate wasted resources, improve delivery and service quality, increase customer and employee satisfaction, and at the same time permanently reduce logistics costs. But it's not all that easy, because the process usually involves breaking up established, sometimes encrusted structures within the company. In this blog article, we would like to show you that the effort is nevertheless worthwhile. To this end, we also present various methods of lean management based on the Toyota Production System (TPS) (developed in the 1940s). In this way, you will find the most suitable solution for your company individually. The aim is to learn from problems, to streamline processes, to operate more efficiently and, quite incidentally, to prove that man does not have to be a "creature of habit" after all.
As mentioned above, "lean management" is a strategic approach or management philosophy that originated in Japan. Applied to warehousing, it is a continuous process aimed at making the organizational and operational structure more efficient and reducing logistics costs. Various methods are used to identify activities that do not add value, to recognize waste and to identify potential for improvement.
But lean management is not an end in itself: The focus is always on the customer. All decisions must be made from the customer's point of view, because the customer is the yardstick for determining which measures actually add value or offer added value.
"Lean management" is a management philosophy derived from the Toyota Production System (TPS) that focuses on the customer's needs. It aims to minimize waste along the entire value chain and establish lean processes.
Lean management cannot be imposed by decree. The key to success is to involve all employees of a company at an early stage, regardless of their hierarchical position, and to get them enthusiastic about the project. Sufficient time should also be planned for the implementation of the lean management approach.
In intralogistics, there are numerous sources where waste - mostly latent - takes place. These can be the process design, employees and workplaces, the technology used, etc. From a situational point of view, it is primarily excess stock, waiting times and bottlenecks, unnecessary journeys and routes, and errors that result in costly additional expenditure.
Our tip: Involve staff or key users in the identification and problem-solving process right from the start. However, do not rely on assumptions: The focus must be exclusively on the purely objective determination of facts in the form of figures and data. The five core principles of lean management provide assistance/orientation in this context:
On the one hand, methods are instructions for action in order to find a suitable solution to a specific problem as quickly as possible. In lean management, however, it is advisable to view each individual method as a tool that must be replaced or combined with another one on a case-by-case basis. After all, it is not possible to deal with the complete range of a customer-oriented overall system with just one tool.
In the following, we present some of these tools:
Other methods or tools include: Gemba, Hansai, Jidoka, Kaizen, Poka-Yoke, Six Sigma, Total Productive Management (TPM) and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Lean management takes the approach that customers should not have to pay for process costs that do not offer them direct added value when purchasing a product or using services. Consequently, it is essentially about eliminating waste that affects a company's profitability.
The methods and tools presented help to achieve this and implement a lean management-oriented continuous improvement process. As mentioned at the beginning, it may make sense to invest in new technologies in the process: For example, many problems can be solved in a quasi-automated manner by introducing a warehouse management system - such as SAP EWM (SAP Extended Warehouse Management).
Ultimately, however, lean management is also a philosophy. In order to actually "live" it, it is necessary that it is supported by all employees in the company across the hierarchy.