Lean Manufacturing to Drive Revenue Growth

Manufacturing is a competitive industry and as you search for solutions that enable you to streamline operations and lower your total production costs, lean manufacturing is sure to be a primary focus. Lean manufacturing enables you to leverage strategies to optimize time, deliver consistent execution and attack quality issues before they become a problem. Quite simply, lean manufacturing can enable you to drive revenue growth.

Lean Manufacturing to Meet Customer Expectations

Even if you don’t have direct customer contact, it is still your job to make sure they get what they want, when they want it. If you work for a progressive and innovative company, you have processes in place to guide the customer on making the right choices that fit within your production capabilities. These processes enable you to better meet customer expectations as they ensure your sales people don’t make promises you can’t keep. When you combine these processes with lean manufacturing, you can meet – or beat customer expectations – and continue to drive repeat business.

Lean Manufacturing Even in Complex Environments

If yours is a complex production environment, it can be easy to assume that lean manufacturing is not a good fit, simply because you have so many things to keep track of to ensure your department can meet demands. In reality, lean manufacturing enables you to improve your operations, streamline complicated processes and reduce the complexities that may not even need to be there. When you assume your environment is too complex, you won’t realize the benefits promised in your lean manufacturing initiatives.

The Holy Grail in Lean Manufacturing

All the talk about streamlining processes and reducing complexities within your environment are great and do deliver benefits for the organization over all, but what you really want to pursue is the holy grail of lean manufacturing – driving top line revenues to drive more profitability. This is definitely something that will make the C-level decision makers sit up and take notice of what you are doing. Yes, it is still important to make those improvements that don’t directly affect revenue numbers, but they don’t demonstrate the same value. If you want to prove your worth, go for revenue improvement in lean manufacturing.

Improve Time-to-Order with Lean Manufacturing

Lean manufacturing enables you to achieve greater accuracy in forecasting your standardized components. As a result, you can speed time-to-order. Lean manufacturing enables you to use optimization strategies such as cellular manufacturing that allow for the easy management of the mix of build-to-order compared with make-to-stock components. You also gain greater accuracy in delivery schedules and customization elements, which enable you to fulfill highly customized orders accurately and more efficiently than in the past.

Lean Manufacturing Drives Cost Reductions

Anything you can do to reduce your overall costs helps to improve profits. When you implement lean manufacturing solutions, you can optimize sourcing and supply chain strategies through time, material and resource waste. By making these processes more lean and responsive to unique customer requirements, you can reduce the time and materials needed to respond to demand. You also enable your organization to become more agile to respond to a changing market, which can improve the overall competitive advantage.