Lean Tools and Techniques for Flow and Pull

Course details

The Lean approach is to eliminate waste from an organization's production and fulfillment processes and to maximize every opportunity to improve efficiencies and customer satisfaction. By applying Lean tools and techniques, organizations can become more competitive and responsive to customer demands. For example, the Visual Workplace is a Lean tool that uses of clear visuals such as signs, labels, and color-coded markings to keep workers from wasting time and effort searching for materials. Another tool just-in-time management ensures there is a continuous supply of components, parts, and supplies so that workers have what they need, where they need it, when they need it. This course will introduce the Visual Workplace and just-in-time management as ways to establish Lean in your organization. The course will present line balancing as a way of increasing throughput and ensuring that work is distributed equally among resources. It will also introduce the Lean concept of kanban, a signaling system that triggers restocking of supplies. This course demonstrates the implementation of these Lean tools in both the manufacturing and service environments.

• identify the goals of the visual workplace
• match tools used in the visual workplace with corresponding examples
• evaluate a customer-supplier relationship to determine how well the Just-in-time method is being applied
• recognize examples of the appropriate way to implement kanbans in a workplace
• identify the goals of line balancing
• use takt time to predict implications for a given company