Zebra Technologies’ recent white paper, Eliminate 7 Wastes from Your Supply Chain with Real-Time Asset Management Solutions, could have just as easily been titled The User Guide to Lean Manufacturing. Like any effective user guide, it identifies specific problems, details solutions to those problems and offers implementation examples.
As the title suggests, this guide identifies seven sources of waste in manufacturing, as follows:
- Over Production: Resulting in unnecessary carrying costs of excess inventory.
- Waiting: Delays in one production step result in wasted labor, etc.
- Transportation: Eliminating or minimizing transportation steps is more effective than merely improving those processes.
- Non-Value Added Processing: Processes that do not add value to the enterprise, such as those associated with unnecessary machinery costs.
- Unnecessary Motion: Literally reducing the steps workers must make when moving from one process to another.
- Excess Inventory: Scheduling overly-large batches or too-long production cycles leads to unnecessary buildup of inventory.
- Defects: Excessive defect rates create unnecessary rework and inefficient allocation of raw materials.
Material Flow Solutions from the Zebra Technologies website
Rest assured that Zebra’s guide to lean manufacturing is entirely pragmatic. So, while the ultimate goal may be the elimination of inventory, waiting, duplication and such, Zebra’s strategies remain fully cognizant that practical goals must, of necessity, accommodate external factors such as material availability, fluctuation in product demand, etc. Zebra understands that real-world manufacturing concerns do not operate in a vacuum.
Its real-world solutions include the Zebra Technologies Material Flow Solution, a comprehensive tool for central management of external and internal supply chains, as well as intra- and inter-facility communications. Zebra details ways in which the Material Flow Solution addresses those original seven sources of wastes enabling manufacturing concerns by:
- Cutting over-production and excess inventory, typically by 5 to 10 percent;
- Reducing labor costs, usually by 15 to 20 percent;
- Improving asset utilization, generally by 5 to 10 percent;
- Eliminating production interruptions;
- Decreasing expedite fees;
- Increasing throughput times; and
- Reducing cycle times.
Zebra also details the methods by which its Vehicle Tracking & Management Solution (VTMS) enables similar efficiencies for vehicle fleets and shares two real-world examples of implementation of its systems: GETRAG FORD’s implementation of its Material Flow Replenishment system at its assembly plant in Cologne, Germany, and Jaguar Land Rover’s deployment of VTMS at its production facility in Solihull, England.
So check it out. You’ll be glad you did.