The 6 Benefits of Moving from Lean-Based Management to Digital Lean Manufacturing-Based Management

Leveraging the momentum of Digitalization to empower people with information, new knowledge, and collaboration tools accelerates the benefits of management based on continuous improvement, such as Lean Manufacturing.

The use of technological solutions offers an improved Return on Investment in the development of Lean projects.

Companies that have adopted Lean Manufacturing-based management as part of their culture, with the aim of establishing continuous improvement processes, are playing in the major league, as this type of initiative allows them to take an initial qualitative leap and differentiate themselves from their competition.

According to the consulting firm Arthur D. Little, managing the different processes generated in the development of a Lean initiative through the use of technological solutions adds additional improvement potential by allowing them to improve the control and analysis, in real time, of what is happening, thus significantly accelerating the ROI.

Improvement Rates During the Lean Project Life Cycle

Source: Arthur D. Little, digital Lean management viewpoint1

What is Lean Manufacturing?

Manufacturers constantly face the challenge of reducing costs, improving productivity, and increasing their manufacturing flexibility while ensuring product quality and customer satisfaction.

These challenges can be addressed through automation and digitization of manufacturing processes, along with the application of continuous improvement and operational excellence practices such as Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma.

While, on the one hand, process automation aims to increase performance, enforce process repeatability, and maintain quality, on the other hand, the pillars of Lean Management focus on process simplification and employee responsibility and knowledge.

In this sense, the main objective of Lean Management is the systematic elimination of activities without added value, focusing on reducing the costs, time, and resources of seven (or eight) processes (MUDAs), to meet demand and maximize value for the customer.

In many manufacturing plants, paper or Excel sheets still seem to play an important role in work management and production control. This means, for example, that each production batch that has to be manufactured is accompanied by a series of “papers.” Each department has its own, with the specific information that they must fill in (work schedules, instructions to follow, annotations and checks, etc.) until documentation (“a set of papers”) is generated, which is specific to each of the batches that are manufactured.

This situation may be more or less bearable depending on several parameters:

• Total amount of raw materials needed to produce.
• Total number of references that the company can produce.
• Number of references that the company can produce in one day.
• Total amount of raw materials needed to produce.
• Difficulty in each batch change.
• Number of parameters that must be recorded or noted in each batch
• Etc…

Benefits of Digitizing Operations in a Lean Manufacturing Environment

Digital Lean Manufacturing relies on the use of technological solutions to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of Lean management principles and methods. Moving Lean to a digital format is fully oriented towards empowering workers and managers, as it offers them contextualized information and data that allows them to face decision-making more effectively and problem-solving more safely.

The main risk is encountered when the digital transformation process is carried out at the highest levels, through the deployment and evolution of ERP systems, but often slows down as we approach the manufacturing part. It is at this point where we still find, even today, production plants with a lot of labor working manually (almost artisanally), or automated manufacturing plants that still maintain traditional work management practices.

In this sense, technology is transforming its traditional approach to be able to respond to these new challenges and new ways of working, through more flexible solutions and facilitating interoperability between machines, systems, and people, offering a series of benefits and guaranteeing and improving ROI:

1. Moving to a paperless manufacturing environment.

It offers more than simply eliminating time-consuming, laborious, and error-prone paper-based systems. With a digital equivalent, simply replacing these paper forms with an intuitive digital user interface (PC, tablet, mobile, etc.) can help make event and production results reporting more efficient and less time-consuming. More importantly, it makes all the entered data available

2. Digitization and centralized storage of information.

It has significant additional benefits beyond instant access and visibility, as paper records do not provide the ability to easily analyze or correlate the collected data and are often generated a posteriori. This is not effective and is too complex for collaborative use. On the other hand, the information that is stored in ERP often lacks the details for the effective resolution of daily problems.

3. Access to accurate and detailed historical data.

It is the basis for continuous improvement, through the analysis and detection of the cause that correlates production performance and the events that occur. Capturing and storing all manufacturing data allows companies to measure, visualize, analyze, and improve the effectiveness of their manufacturing processes.

4. Real-time visibility.

Real-time visibility of operating results and being able to compare them, in real time, to the planned ones, as well as the general visibility of the production problems that are appearing at that moment, allow for better decision-making and problem-solving.

5. Interdepartmental collaboration.

This visibility throughout the process promotes collaboration between departments and minimizes the impact of unplanned events, providing a new understanding and intelligence to maximize operational efficiency.

6. Digitized management and distribution of work orders

It helps to optimize production performance and flexibility, as it allows the sequence of work orders based on priority and products, with the aim of minimizing format changes. The digitized management of tasks, instructions, and procedures ensures correct distribution of the same, eliminating wasted time and errors that occur when searching for this information in papers, as well as facilitates the distribution of the same, when there is an update of the procedure.

Can you imagine being able to:

1. Measure and track business KPIs, in real time, to facilitate support for decision-making and the participation of different actors.
2. Proactively send automatic notifications to reduce the time of corrective actions, warn of format changes, completion of the batch being produced, etc.
3. Display KPIs at different points in the factory (for example, through panels), with the aim of facilitating teamwork and interdepartmental collaboration.
4. Have access to information and tasks based on the different roles and/or location within the factory, through PCs and mobile devices.
5. Move from manual data collection to automatic collection.
6. Be able to analyze the information to detect points of improvement that are not visible to the naked eye.
7. Be able to work and manage the different workflows in a standardized way.

In summary, allowing collaboration and eliminating inoperability that occurs when trying to manage all this information and coordinate the different actors, through data collection and the digitization of all information and procedures, is the key to being able to face a continuous improvement initiative of operations with maximum effectiveness.

I add these two links in case you want to expand the information regarding how, from Wonderware, we respond to this type of challenge in your sector:

• https://www.wonderware.es/mes-mom/7-razones-para-implantar-un-proyecto-mes-mom/
• https://www.wonderware.es/Industrias/

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