In September (the 20th and 21st), at the Vicenza Trade Fair, over 250 companies gathered for a meeting promoted by CUOA, featuring the most important experts in the discipline known as Lean Manufacturing.
These companies represented diverse sectors: from mechanics to chemistry, from “electronics to” construction, from private to public sectors!
In this context, Italy’s first Lean example in healthcare, specifically the Florence hospital, is of extreme interest.
It’s recent news that the Vicenza Court has successfully completed the experimental phase of TPS (The Vicenza Journal, November 16, 2011)!
Lean discipline is making a strong entry to improve bureaucracy!
Lean management is a business strategy with Japanese origins, specifically from Toyota, which continues to be the world’s best practitioner of this discipline.
Known also as TPS (Toyota Production System), it has become a worldwide success.
This system represents an important analytical effort aimed at reorganizing production processes, identifying waste, and reducing resources used to the strictly necessary.
The objective seems simple and obvious:
Eliminate waste to produce more with the minimum possible resource consumption
(resources of any kind from materials to personnel, from overproduction to excess inventory, from idle time to unnecessary movements and/or routes)
Thus increasing productivity, reducing warehouses and their physical space, as material rotation is faster (therefore moving more quickly through the company and requiring much less space)!
Since the early 2000s, Lean Manufacturing in EUROPE has become increasingly known and applied, becoming an essential discipline in many sectors!
After the Vicenza event, Prime’s management decided to embrace a Lean Manufacturing journey through Apindustria Vicenza, which works with a “Lombard” consulting firm, Marco Redaelli & Associates of Milan.
The investment, which involves company personnel at all levels, started in October with great enthusiasm.
This journey will accompany Prime throughout much of next year, 2012.
It certainly won’t be an easy commitment: it will require humility and great dedication along with consistency in doing things and tackling a new discipline!
Thanks to the support we’ll receive in the coming months, we’ll learn the theoretical part, with all the “tricks of the trade”.
The “lion’s share “will ultimately be taken by the subsequent practical examples: it is indeed fundamental to “personally experience” the challenges that this discipline requires in the field, to be implemented correctly, before achieving the much-anticipated “extraordinary results”!!
Every area of the company will be involved in this project, from warehouse to production, from administration to testing, including the commercial area!!
Starting from a known data baseline, we will measure improvements and performance in terms of speed between an order’s entry into the company and its completion!
We will improve “efficiency in production line set-ups and in” production efficiency itself.
We will increasingly specialize in small production batches, increasing product quality thanks to techniques that will allow us to minimize the possibility of human error, and last but not least… we’ll become faster too!
The beauty of this will be the active involvement of our customers who will be able to see firsthand the progress we make…
there will certainly be times when we take a step backward…
but we will surely have taken two steps forward!
Thank you for your attention, and if you have any curiosity and/or questions, don’t hesitate to ask,
The Prime Team is at your disposal!
