India is considered one of the fastest-growing destinations for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and electronics manufacturing services (EMS) providers and presently the electronics industry is attracting huge investments to upgrade its quality tools as well as production capacity. On the other hand, this sector is also facing a lot of challenges such as a rise in customer expectation, fluctuating demand, taxation, lack of infrastructure, supply chain issues and so on which are contributing to holding the sector back. Considering the radical changes within the industry, a great deal of thought must be given on how to tackle these challenges. Lean manufacturing could be an answer to a few of these challenges.

Lean manufacturing is relatively a recent advance in the electronics manufacturing service sector, which relentlessly identifies and eliminates waste and maximizes resource utilization in response to the fluctuating and competitive business environment. Lean is founded on the concept of continuous and incremental improvements on product and process while eliminating redundant activities.

In simple words, Lean manufacturing is a wide set of production practices implemented to eliminate or reduce waste or any activity that consumes resources without adding value to design, manufacturing, distribution, and customer service processes. It was developed by the Toyota executive Taiichi Ohno (1912-90) for large repetitive manufacturing in the automotive sector during the post-Second World War reconstruction period in Japan, and was popularized by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones in their 1996 book ‘Lean Thinking’.

Lean as a stimulus to growth

There isn’t an organization that does not face problems. Shigeo Shingo famously said, “Having no problems is the biggest problem of all.”

Following the lean growth model in the manufacturing industry helps to increase productivity by ‘doing more with fewer resources’, that is, the percentage of growth will be more as wastage is eliminated thereby improving quality while minimizing production time and cost. Implementing a lean manufacturing system is becoming a core competency for an electronics manufacturer to excel in the electronics industry. Thus, a successful lean implementation in an organization has a significant impact on the performance of the entire organization.

“We are faced with the typical problem that most organizations have – a lot of functional silos that are disrupting each other. It could be really beneficial to facilitate our cross-functional teams through a really deep exercise to understand how their system works and why it performs as it does and how the performance can be bettered through best practices”, opines T R Srinivasan, Operations Director at Vinyas Innovative Technologies.

The most powerful aspect of lean is being able to solve problems in a scientific method. There are a number of positive outcomes of following lean and to list a few are:

• Reduces lead times by eliminating waste within processes by incorporating better, more streamlined performances within an organization from the top down.
• Improves speed and acceleration within business, quality and price without incorporating costs in doing so.
• Capability to specify value from our customer’s viewpoint by identifying the value stream, for example; physical flow, information flow and new product introduction.
• Improves the value-adding activities and reduces or eliminates the non-value-adding activities.
• Creates a cycle to drive continuous improvement to improve manufacturing efficiency.
• Improves overall business performance, optimizes inventory control, encourages flexibility, allows rapid responses, and prevents the under-utilization of equipment.

Final Thoughts

Passion for excellence and the hours of study and thought eventually ensures that odd pieces fall into place. It was apparent then, and still is today, that change happens through people. Even though the effective implementation of lean is truly dependent on people, the quality and manufacturing tools assist people in solving problems as well as achieving desired results. It is about the constant, persistent, even relentless pursuit of improving the current situation and making efficient use of resources in the creation of value for the end customer through lean practices. While organizations are on the way to embracing the full power of Lean, focused implementation can be rewarding especially when the ‘’before’’ vs ‘’after ‘’ presentations elicit thunderous applause.