Lean manufacturing and lean in service and introduction. Let's understand lean with a short story. The management of one of the soap manufacturing organizations invested about $3 million to buy a new machinery that would automate the soap manufacturing process. This new machinery helped reduce manual work, increase production capacity and improve turnaround time. While it improve the efficiency of the soap manufacturing process, it had one major drawback. The distributors soon started complaining that many of the soap boxes were empty.
It did not have a soap. Now, this automated machinery would manufacturers soaps and pack them into cardboard boxes. How could this machinery Leave the soap boxes empty. The owner of the organization was furious. He immediately ordered an investigation and asked what it could take to fix the issue. After looking at the issue, the managers of the organization recommended a fix that would cost another million dollars for implementation.
The owner was infuriated, his anger was valid. The organization had already invested $3 million in getting this machine and now it is asking for more money. As a result, he decided to take a second opinion. He walked to the shop floor and shared this problem with those individuals who handled the machinery. This was the ground level staff who did the real job of soap manufacturing and packaging using that machine. These guys were never consulted.
By the management team before recommending that costly fix, when they heard the issue, one of them said, Oh, is this a problem? MP so boxes are being shipped to the distributors? No worries, I have a solution. Just hang on for a moment. He went into the warehouse and brought two large fans. He kept those fans in the front of the conveyor belt, packaged so boxes traveled through the conveyor belt and were then thrown into a steel basket.
As soon as he started those two fans, those cardboard boxes that were empty, few away eliminating the chance of transporting empty soap boxes. Now the distributors would never complain again on this issue. That's what we call lean thinking. Isn't that cool?