Benefits From Lean and Cellular Manufacturing

Lean Resources

Lean Manufacturing and Cellular Manufacturing offer many advantages in material handling, inventory, quality, scheduling, personnel and customer satisfaction. Workcells derive these advantages from their small size and process integration. They also fit the human penchant for working in small groups. The links below summarize the benefits you can expect from a well-managed design and implementation.

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Material Handling Benefits

Inventory Benefits

Quality Benefits

People Benefits

Customer Benefits

Metrics For Lean Manufacturing

Lean metrics go beyond traditional financial and accounting measurements. Accounting and financial metrics often measure only the end result. They do not help control the process, solve problems or motivate people. The links above not only show typical benefits, they demonstrate the types of metrics and measurement appropriate for a Lean Manufacturing system. Here are some general principles for metrics:

Principles for Lean Metrics

Keep It Simple	Use metrics that are easy to compile and update. Complex calculations or metrics that require excessive work do not get updated or people get lazy and fake the data.
Use Tripwires	Simple metrics may not reveal the problem source. This is OK. The daily or weekly metric only needs to alert you that a problem exists.
Limit The Metrics	Each person or team should have 3-6 daily or weekly metrics. More than this and the metrics do not get monitored. These metrics do not have to contain all the information that the person or group will ever need; they should just signal an alert.
Drill Down When Problems Arise	When a "tripwire" metric indicates a deviation, you can investigate further to find the source of the problem. This may require additional data that is not continually gathered, processed and analyzed.