Lean Manufacturing: A Plant Floor Guide

Your company’s losing money and it can’t be denied that waste is a major culprit. You’ve read the statistics: facilities that convert to lean manufacturing double labor productivity while cutting throughput times by 90%. It all works out on paper, but you’ve been handed the significant task of making it work in your facility. Now what? This is where the theoretical rubber meets the road.

Lean Manufacturing: A Plant Floor Guide is a complete inventory of the elements needed for successful lean implementation. It provides an overview and a specific rationale for your initiative. It is an easy-to-digest reference to aspects of lean that you may not know about. It's a virtual toolbox of information that can be readily put to use on the plant floor.

The internationally renowned editors take you on a comprehensive "street level" journey through lean implementation, from the seven wastes and flow processes to developing a business case, using lean tools, and applying readers' newfound knowledge at greenfield and brownfield sites. Specific chapters on mapping the value stream,policy deployment, the five-phase implementation process, and problem-solving crystallize concepts with a pragmatic treatment. In addition, the brownfield implementation chapter is a must-read for anyone contemplating a lean changeover from traditional mass production. Here are just some of the benefits of this book: 

• Lean implementers can achieve complete implementation using a proven five-phase model as a guide. 
• A strong business case can be developed to justify the lean initiative.
• Ideas for getting employee buy-in to the concept that “problems are good.” 
• Case studies highlight real-world issues that must be considered in the complex undertaking of lean. 
• Entire chapters are devoted to specific lean tools, such as standardized work, Total Productive Maintenance, pull systems, and quick changeover.