Shelf Space: Learn to be Lean

The topic of lean manufacturing processes has kept coming up in conversations and interviews with package printers and converters in recent months. While it’s really nothing new—the strategy of bottom-up thinking and continuous improvement stems from processes adopted by Toyota well over 30 years ago—the practice is becoming more commonplace among package printers and converters. And with good reason: A lean approach breeds efficiency, improves productivity and helps lower the cost of production. And you get to learn new words, like kaizen, kanban, and muda. All good things.

According to some converters who have adopted lean thinking and its practices, there’s an almost evangelical side to the process, and many members of the lean community are eager share what they know with newbies. Others are less generous, claiming the practices they have adopted are their companies’ intellectual property, and refuse to share what they believe provides them a competitive advantage. So be it.

The foundation of lean is objective thinking: How can we do this job better? What other processes feed this job? How can we do them better? As the process continues, every part of an operation becomes fair play for the lean mantra of continuous improvement. A few years ago I was shooting video at a commercial printer near Chicago. He had recently completed a company-wide transition to lean. From the back office to the warehouse to prepress to the shop floor to the loading dock, he had instituted lean practices that resulted in greater accuracy, getting more work processed on time, in less time, and without increasing head count. And many of his team were able to add value across multiple job functions and processes. “People want to do a good job,” one converter told me recently. “Lean processes involve their ideas and help them do that.”

What I find interesting is that in many ways lean is a lot of common sense objective thinking about how things are done. There are dozens of steps, procedures and workflows in any converter’s shop that are done a certain way simply because “that’s how we do it here.” But suggesting a new approach can be greeted with skepticism—or even contempt. Raise your hand if this sounds familiar.

With lean, though, changes can be actionable. There are books to read, courses to help flesh out the processes, and advisors available to provide hands-on coaching and offer objective third-party perspectives. Best of all, most of the effort comes from the people on your operational front lines, the ones who do the heavy lifting of getting jobs in, processed and out the door in the shortest possible amount of time. These folks likely have some excellent ideas about how things can be done more efficiently. Lean makes you listen to them. Chances are, many of your team will buy into a lean strategy and contribute right from the get-go. Others may take a bit longer. And that’s OK, too.

Package printers and converters have told me that adopting lean practices energizes companies and makes it easier to achieve new goals. Lean has the potential to transform the way your business operates and can help position your company for greater success. And at the very least, you’ll rout out some inefficiencies and find some ways to work a bit smarter. Start looking at ways to adopt a lean strategy for your business. What do you have to lose? pP

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