by Emily Newton
Lean manufacturing is nothing new, but many organizations still struggle to embrace the practice. While the philosophy’s benefits are clear, how to implement these principles effectively is often less so. Revisiting the lean manufacturing audit is a good first step.
Audits are a crucial but easy-to-miss step in the lean process. If you can implement lean auditing best practices, you’ll find driving ongoing improvements throughout your facility much easier.
The Importance of the Lean Manufacturing Audit
Many manufacturers miss auditing’s importance because its core tenets appear deceptively universal. While lean manufacturing covers five principles and eight wastes across all use cases, each category plays out differently in varying scenarios. Waste in one factory may not look the same as another’s excess, so the most effective reduction strategy will likewise differ.
A lean manufacturing audit reveals where a specific facility falls across the five lean principles. It’ll show what needs to improve and what is acceptable, not generally but according to the company’s unique workflows and goals. With this insight, you can understand the best path forward for your organization.
Without an effective audit, you’ll work off of generalities. Doing so will make it difficult to achieve meaningful results. By contrast, auditing your current processes will drive more targeted improvements.
Lean Auditing Best Practices
Auditing alone isn’t enough to drive optimal lean manufacturing strategies. You must optimize the audit itself. With that in mind, here are five lean auditing best practices to adopt:
1. Define Clear and Relevant Goals
The first step in an effective lean manufacturing audit is identifying clear goals. Listing the five core lean principles as goals is tempting, but these are too general to be useful. Instead, use them as baselines to inform facility-specific targets.
You may want to reduce a factory’s inventory — one of the eight wastes. To make this goal more specific, you could target a related metric like inventory turnover ratio. A reasonable goal could be to fall below the industry average turnover or your own ratio from last year.
On top of being specific, these goals must be relevant. The average inventory turnover in technology manufacturing is over five times higher than in the consumer discretionary sector. Consequently, comparisons across multiple industries won’t offer much help, as what’s impressive in one isn’t in another.
2. Be Specific But Address All Areas
As you’re outlining audit targets, avoid sacrificing completeness for specificity. While your goals and steps to measure them should be specific, your audit’s scope benefits from being broad.
Ensuring a comprehensive audit is important because waste can stem from unexpected, seemingly minor places. Businesses waste $3.2 billion a year by always running air compressors at full capacity when they only need to for 60 to 100 hours weekly. Air compressor energy waste may not stand out before the audit, but this little change makes a big difference.
Lean manufacturing audits should address all six tenets and eight wastes. Similarly, they should cover every aspect of your business. Alternatively, you could focus on one element at a time but perform individual audits for each area within the year. Targets within these categories should be specific, but being comprehensive provides more insight.
3. Use Data to Gain More Insight
Capitalizing on new technology is another lean auditing best practice to implement. Specific goals are only practical if you can achieve similar specificity in your measurements. In today’s world, that means using technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) to gather process-specific data.
IoT sensors can take audits further by enabling real-time alerts. Some manufacturers have been able to respond to issues 75% faster by capitalizing on that potential. As soon as machine or workflow data falls outside acceptable parameters, these devices can alert relevant stakeholders for streamlined, accurate audits.
Collecting hard data on more processes has long-term benefits, too. Over time, trends will emerge in this information. Your audits can address these trends to gauge the efficacy of various changes or identify new issues to adapt to.
4. Make Sure the Audit Itself Is Lean
As you embrace these other lean auditing best practices, your review process may grow larger and more involved than necessary. While you want your audit to be as informative as possible, there is such a thing as going too far. If the goal is to be lean, your audit should be lean, too.
The key to streamlining audits while keeping them comprehensive is focusing on which steps deliver real value. Unnecessary paperwork, involving employees whose time is better spent elsewhere and information exchanging hands too frequently are common audit wastes.
You should also look for alternative methods to streamline certain audit processes. Automation is a big one. Data entry takes up one to three hours of most workers’ days but is easily automatable. Using IoT devices to collect audit information and AI or robotic process automation (RPA) to automate its organization and sharing will enable much faster, less error-prone audits.
5. Follow Up Later
Finally, no lean manufacturing audit is complete without a response. On its own, an audit only reveals information. You must act on this insight for it to be useful, and you’ll know how useful it is if you track the same metrics over time.
After identifying key areas to improve, create a strategy addressing each one, including relevant, specific targets. Once you begin implementing these fixes, follow up with those in charge of each to ensure you’re actively pursuing your goals. Keep gathering the same data you used in the audit all the while.
Once enough time has passed, use this information to gauge your changes’ efficacy. In most cases, some adjustments will yield improvements, but not all. You can use these results to craft more effective strategies afterward. If nothing changed one way or the other, question whether your audit itself was relevant or specific enough.
Lean Manufacturing Audits Pave the Way for Improvements
Lean manufacturing is impossible to implement without audits. You must know where you stand to understand how to reduce waste and maximize efficiency. A thorough audit helps you learn just that.
These lean auditing best practices will guide you through crafting a more effective lean manufacturing strategy. Be sure to adapt them to your specific situation and needs. If you can do that, you can embrace ongoing improvements, ensuring future success.
