A Little Background

Just to give you a little background into my experience with Lean Manufacturing....

I work for a Large Privately owned Commodities company. For now I would like to keep which company a mystery, but I may feel the need to share the company name later on in future posts.

We have been adapting LEAN Principles to our manufacturing processes since 1999. 

Our Journey began with the hiring of a new Manufacturing engineer who brought with him many new ideas and ideals that would forever change how we did daily business in our branch of the corporation. These principles would soon start to influence our head quarters and eventually the other branches of our company. 

No matter what company you work for or what your company does LEAN manufacturing IS the pathway to the Goal of every company..... to make money. It opens doors to making your products at a lower cost while increasing your profit at the same time. Lets face it, we live in an ever changing world and if we don't change, if we don't modify our manufacturing practices we will not be able to keep our jobs here in the USA because it will be too expensive to produce our finished goods. 

We must LIVE LEAN Principles in order to survive todays market and to compete with foreign Conglomerates. We had the answers First but were to stupid to see what we had so those who had the original vision taught it to the Japanese, who now are re-teaching us. They have become the masters and we must be humble enough to learn from them.

As I post in the future I will try to relate many of the experiences that I have personally lived/worked through to get to the point we are now. 

Don't get me wrong we are in no way world class...... yet. 

But that is what we are all striving for, right?