Lean manufacturing has a lexicon all its own. Terms like Kaizen, Kanban, and Five Ss permeate the vocabulary of many in manufacturing operations today. Just don't equate mastering a set of terms with guaranteed success at lean.

Instead—according to a new report, "Best Practices in Lean," from Aberdeen Group (617-723-7890)—success with lean is only partially technique.

"Our view is that companies work to the limits of their capabilities," says John Fontanella, senior vice president and research director with Aberdeen. "Those limits may be organizational, or they may have to do with the strategic vision of the management team. So it's unlikely that you'll see every company go all out and embrace every lean concept. Companies generally pick and choose the lean concepts they can incorporate within their process."

For example, Beatrice, Neb.-based Husqvarna—a division of Electrolux that makes lawnmowers and other power products for turf care businesses—first deployed Kanban materials management for service parts production, rather than moving to Kanban for all of its manufacturing. According to Fontanella, it's not uncommon for companies to mix Kanban-driven lines with more traditionally scheduled lines, or incorporate constraints-based scheduling with lean.

Another best-in-class lean practitioner in the report is WIKA Instruments Corp., a global manufacturer of pressure and temperature gauges for industrial markets. WIKA has deployed Kanban and Kaizen techniques to improve operations at its Lawrenceville, Ga., plant, but also benefited from lean strategy setting.

Darren Hogg, CIO for WIKA's Americas operations, says those meetings were part of a strategic management leadership process for lean. The overriding aim of WIKA's lean effort, he says, is to make operations more customer driven, rather than oriented around procurement or point production efficiencies. "In effect, our customers schedule our plant," Hogg says. "That's how we see it now. They are the ones who tell us what to make, and when to make it."

While lean does entail specific techniques, and impacts materials handling, the involvement of senior management in setting goals are at least as important. "Culture is such a large part of lean," Fontanella says. "It's preparing the organization for lean that is extremely difficult. Many of the others are tactics, and how you do those are going to be specific to your operation."

Another lesson from the best-in-class: Don't restrict lean to the plant floor. The more advanced lean manufacturers are reaching out to suppliers and customers, notes Jane Biddle, Aberdeen's vice president of manufacturing research. "Lean is the core strategy for a leading multi-tier automotive company profiled in this study," Biddle says. "From the customer's customer, through the supplier's supplier, this giant is well on its way to transforming its entire supply chain, including its numerous manufacturing plants, from a push to a pull environment."

In other words, the success of lean ultimately depends on an integration of tactics and techniques with a culture that advocates lean both within and outside the four walls. Key components of success here include flexibility, responsive materials handling and a broad supply chain view. Here are some of the highlights from the report on how these techniques and culture work together.

Rather than building in large lot sizes to meet a forecast—the traditional push style of manufacturing—lean pulls work through the plant by a demand signal. The signal can be actual orders or a draw down on a small finished goods buffer. In any case, the goal is to let daily customer demand drive production in the smallest lot size possible. While this sounds sensible in theory, making the concept work entails a set of techniques.

These include Kanban materials management, in which cards or electronic signals are used to trigger materials replenishment as goods are assembled on lean lines. The lines themselves typically use some form of level-pull or flow production in which the rate of daily production is set by a "pacemaker'" operation. Kanban is used to pull work through the rest of the line.

To establish level-pull, however, companies often go through intensive exercises to map out production tasks in light of the likely demand variation and product mix for a plant. They also may reconfigure traditional assembly lines into work cells that can more flexibly handle the product mix. Continuous improvement and work area organization techniques such as Kaizen events and Five S concepts help rid the plant floor of wasted time and movement.

All of these techniques, according to Fontanella, bring more order to manufacturing operations, but the intent of the order is make the lean lines more responsive to actual demand within the established parameters. Though lean philosophy rejects the build-up of inventories, some work-in-process or finished goods inventory is permissible to buffer against uncertainty, he adds.

Lean concepts will be quickly defeated if management reverts to practices such as rush orders, says Fontanella.

"In manufacturing, the more control you bring to the plant floor, the more nervous management outside of manufacturing gets, because you are defying decades – old concepts about how manufacturing should work," he says. "If you are a manager on the customer-facing side, you want to be able to stuff the production floor with orders. It is counterintuitive to them that if you have a more controlled process, it will be a more responsive process, but in the cases we've seen, a more controlled process can be more responsive."

WIKA, for example, was able to cut order lead time from about six weeks down to just five days via lean methods. According to Hogg, the company's CIO, the plant was reorganized around work cells that brought together pre-assembly and final assembly. Kaizen events were held to determine the key bottleneck, which turned out to be calibration. However, says Hogg, the strategic management leadership (SML) meetings also were vital. "After addressing some of the low-hanging fruit in terms of work cells, the next step was deciding what we wanted to do strategically as an organization," he says. "The SML meetings addressed factors like lead time, inventory and sales per employee objectives."

WIKA also is in the process of deploying a new enterprise resources planning (ERP) system (Microsoft Business Solutions, 888-477-7989) with lean modules including electronic Kanban. But as Hogg points out, changing the relationship with customers and suppliers also is part of the effort. WIKA is working with its customers to get them to place orders more frequently, and with suppliers to match purchasing to the lot sizes needed to fill customer orders. "You have to be more customer focused with lean, and push the requirements back to your suppliers," says Hogg.

Lean changes materials handling in fundamental ways. One obvious place is Kanban, which often uses special bins to hold parts needed at work cells.

"I see a lot of use of special containers," says Fontanella. "One of the big issues with these containers is they are relatively expensive and need to be tracked. Their use also goes beyond the four walls. They can be shared between you and your suppliers, with suppliers shipping them ready to be placed on the line."

Though some plants are configured so that suppliers can deliver shipments right to the point of use, Fontanella says such layouts are fairly rare. More common, however, is the need for smaller work in process (WIP) inventory locations. In push-style manufacturing, large queues of raw materials are often left in front of machines to ensure high utilization. However, lean's smaller lot sizes and de-emphasis of machine utilization mean that WIP inventories are smaller. Where to locate Kanbans and other inventory locations is sometimes established in what lean advocates call a "value-stream mapping" process.

Automated materials handling equipment such as conveyor systems or automatic guided vehicles can still have a place in a lean operation, says Fontanella. But they must be flexible enough to be reconfigured. Look for hardware systems that are more modular, says Fontanella, and that have a control software layer that is flexible.

"The number one piece of advice is to design flexibility into the way you deploy materials handling equipment," he says. "Time and time again, I've seen companies spending a great deal of capital installing materials handling equipment, and what they find is that makes the current process very efficient, but it prevents them from easily moving to even more efficient operations."

As best-in-class examples show, lean progression often includes coordination with suppliers and customers. Technology solutions such as electronic Kanban offerings, are especially helpful in communicating lean signals with suppliers.

Fontanella adds that internally, managers in areas such as logistics also need to be involved in the lean effort. Dock scheduling, for example, ensures that materials move from the yard to the plant without wasted time and handling.

Likewise, Fontanella says, transportation needs to be synched with lean production. "Transportation has become essential for lean operations, especially as we move away from vertically integrated operations, to more outsourced activities with partners interacting within a network," he says.

Overall, says Biddle, organizations should look to extend lean beyond a set of plant-floor tactics. "Lean's individual techniques are now considered common sense when you talk to manufacturing people," she says. "The challenge is in pulling it all together within a consistent strategy to lean out the entire supply chain operation. That's why you need lean advocates to pull it all together in a coherent program that extends from supplier, to the shop floor and beyond."