Certainly lean manufacturing is a very good system. It is very effective and efficient. Lean manufacturing concepts outscores almost all the conventional manufacturing concepts by large margins. Lean manufacturing is the system for future.

Concept of waste elimination will be much more important in the future. With the population growth, depreciation of available resources, requirement for systems which can utilize the available resources efficiently. Apart from this, wastes in any form are tightly related to the pollution. Pollution and environmental issues are becoming more and more important. Certainly any manufacturer or a service provider can not ignore the requirement for environmental friendly techniques. All the concepts and techniques in lean manufacturing are geared towards achieving these objectives. Therefore it is obvious to say that lean manufacturing show a very bright future.

Among other wastes, transportation is given higher priority in lean manufacturing. Elimination of the requirement for transportation is achieved by improved layouts and using multi skilled labor and so on. Therefore the internal transportation problems are well advised within the system.

But in the back bone of lean manufacturing, there is JIT. JIT depends on Just In Time Purchasing, Just In Time Manufacturing and Just In Time Distribution. Due to this, lean manufacturing heavily depends on small batch purchasing, small batch transportation of raw materials and small quantity, frequent shipments for buyers. Without this lean manufacturing will no more be possible. My problem starts here.

Due to ever increasing oil prices and transportation costs, cost of small batch operations will go high. Benefits this system meant to deliver with small batch operations (like reduction of storage costs etc) will be balanced by the increased costs of transportation. Although increase of oil prices will make other costs like cost of electricity to go high, I believe the cost of transportation will be even higher than the savings on these increasing costs. In future, if a manufacturer wants to become lean, then he will have lesser positives in the system to make a dramatic move towards lean manufacturing.

Is their a solution for this. Of cause we can’t reduce the oil prices. We can’t stop flow of frequent batch of raw materials, since then it will not be a lean manufacturing system. We can fight this problem by managing transportation issue efficiently and intelligently. Stick to Optimization concept of lean manufacturing. Optimize the transport systems so that it will deliver the best possible value to the entire system.

I am Aza, a process engineer, consultant and the author of the e-book “Lean manufacturing basics” which is freely available on my site at http://www.leanmanufacturingconcepts.com

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