Balfours
...impressive! In one area we were able to manufacture for a major new contract without further investment whilst we were upgrading facilities at one of our other manufacturing sites.
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You are here: Home arrow Lean Principles arrow Overview
Overview of Lean Principles
Article Index
Overview of Lean Principles
Connecting your Customer to your Supply Chain
The Death of Forecasting
Accounting and Planning for Customers
Batch production and queuing should be eradicated
Speed is the Key to Applying Flexibility and Innovation
Continuous Processing and Layout
Non Manufacturing Environments
Going too far too fast
Some Historical and Current Context
Page 9 of 10

Going too far too fast

There are many qualifications about how far you can go up this path and how fast you should try to do it. The risk needs to be closely evaluated and managed. Many questions arise:

  • Who are your competitors and have they made the move?
  • Where are your suppliers?
  • Do your suppliers need to be educated?
  • Where are your customers?
  • Do your customers need to be educated?
  • Do you have a lot of small customers far away or a lot of big customers nearby?
  • How many products do you make?
  • How many physical changes do you need to make?
  • How many sites do you operate from?
  • How big is the financial and performance prize at the end of each step in the transition?
The move toward these new principles can unlock enormous financial value very quickly but the benefits come in stages and careful planning and preparation is required to make the transition smooth.
 

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