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Lean management : an essential and transversal approach in our factories
LACROIX Electronics
Customers’ requirements grow and change constantly. Against this backdrop, we are expanding a continuous improvement initiative aimed at maintaining the company’s position as a leading European designer and manufacturer of electronic equipment. This article highlights how we managed to implement lean management to answer our customers’ needs.
What is lean management?
Lean management is an approach to maximize customer value while reducing waste. It is inspired by the Toyota Production System (TPS). The main goal is to create a continuous improvement culture in order to improve efficiency and reduce time spent on non-valuable tasks, thereby optimize workflows.
Better than yesterday, tomorrow better still
The lean management approach implemented in our factories is fundamental and cross-cutting. It helps to optimize our industrial performance and strengthen our management systems on a daily basis.
It is a way of making our processes more streamlined and agile in terms of both production and support activities. Specifically, using this strategy has enabled us to shorten lead times for the goods manufactured in our factories and to boost our processes, allowing us to meet our customers’ ever-growing Time-to-Market concerns.
To support us in this process, we rely on a systematization of Kaizen approaches. Which means, at all levels, our employees receive training in the methods used so that they can lead the way in future areas for continuous improvement. Being supported through the change is essential for making lean management a pillar of our corporate culture.
An organisation for added value
Supported by managers, our teams first carried out “Value Stream Mapping” on our production flows and “Swimlanes” on our support services. These two steps serve to analyze our value chain in order to gain an overview of flows and sources of waste. They enabled the targets, aims and action plans for each improvement area to be established.
Our project teams have drawn up transformation plans and set up task forces to prepare for the future with a customer-oriented organization. The aim is to develop our production processes into self-contained, “One-Piece-Flow” cells with pull system production.
Thanks to the LACROIX Daily Meeting performance management system, each member involved in the process is able to contribute so that sources of improvement can be shared across all levels.
Performance driven by continuous improvement
This approach has vastly increased team involvement and thus strengthened our organization:
- A hundred projects completed by 2022
- Significant reduction of waste and stock
- Optimization of product transit times in the plant: over 50% time saved for certain products, with a significant improvement in customer service
- Continuous improvement of our industrial performance
- Enhanced customer satisfaction
Team involvement and daily management of these improvement areas have enabled us to implement many effective solutions, and many more to come!
This way, continuous improvement allows our teams to keep a sharp eye on how to optimize their work and improve industrial performance at every stage of the production. With this approach, we are able to take a look at the future and evolve with our environment. It is one of the many key to help us stay a leader of the electronic sector.
Dive deeper into our lean management approach with our next article : Lean Management 4.0 has come to LACROIX!
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