Weak link of lean manufacturing
Certainly lean manufacturing is a very good system. It is very
effective and efficient. Lean manufacturing concepts outscores
almost all the conventional manufacturing concepts by large
margins. Lean manufacturing is the system for future.
Concept of waste elimination will be much more important in the
future. With the population growth, depreciation of available
resources, requirement for systems which can utilize the
available resources efficiently. Apart from this, wastes in any
form are tightly related to the pollution. Pollution and
environmental issues are becoming more and more important.
Certainly any manufacturer or a service provider can not ignore
the requirement for environmental friendly techniques. All the
concepts and techniques in lean manufacturing are geared towards
achieving these objectives. Therefore it is obvious to say that
lean manufacturing show a very bright future.
Among other wastes, transportation is given higher priority in
lean manufacturing. Elimination of the requirement for
transportation is achieved by improved layouts and using multi
skilled labor and so on. Therefore the internal transportation
problems are well advised within the system.
But in the back bone of lean manufacturing, there is JIT. JIT
depends on Just In Time Purchasing, Just In Time Manufacturing
and Just In Time Distribution. Due to this, lean manufacturing
heavily depends on small batch purchasing, small batch
transportation of raw materials and small quantity, frequent
shipments for buyers. Without this lean manufacturing will no
more be possible. My problem starts here.
Due to ever increasing oil prices and transportation costs, cost
of small batch operations will go high. Benefits this system
meant to deliver with small batch operations (like reduction of
storage costs etc) will be balanced by the increased costs of
transportation. Although increase of oil prices will make other
costs like cost of electricity to go high, I believe the cost of
transportation will be even higher than the savings on these
increasing costs. In future, if a manufacturer wants to become
lean, then he will have lesser positives in the system to make a
dramatic move towards lean manufacturing.
Is their a solution for this. Of cause we can't reduce the oil
prices. We can't stop flow of frequent batch of raw materials,
since then it will not be a lean manufacturing system. We can
fight this problem by managing transportation issue efficiently
and intelligently. Stick to Optimization concept of lean
manufacturing. Optimize the transport systems so that it will
deliver the best possible value to the entire system.