JOB SHOP LEAN MANUFACTURING

Welcome to Job Shop Lean Manufacturing! While there is a wealth of information online about the implementation of lean manufacturing in traditional continuous flow operations, there is very little accurate information regarding it's application to job shops. Our goal is to change that, and provide high quality articles and tools to get your business started down the path of continuous improvement.

Job shops present their own unique set of operational challenges, which include:

• Bottlenecks move in the shop based upon jobs being run and product mix
• Flow of information to the shop floor, including engineering drawings, is critical but often lacking
• Difficult to synchronize the flow of materials with a production schedule that is constantly changing
• Creating realistic job estimates and shop floor accountability metrics is problematic
• Quality can be inconsistent and difficult to measure
• Lead time is often longer than customers want, and on-time delivery inconsistent
• Many of the lean and six sigma tools often employed in conventional manufacturing do not convert into the high variation, low batch size operations

Most of our articles are written by operations professionals with years of hands-on experience.  So while we will occasionally delve into the theoretical aspects of lean, our focus is on providing practical examples you can apply to your business.