#lean

Lean production and administration is a philosophy of resource handling. The purpose is to identify all parts of a process that do not add value for the client, and eliminate them.

Here at OFFECCT we began to work with the concept of lean about one and a half years ago. We started in the production process, and the employees concerned had a course at the University College of Skövde.

We learnt that there are ways to make the production more efficient and less resource-demanding while keeping the high quality of the end-product. The point is not to make the process as cheap as possible, but to eliminate everything that does not add value, and to eliminate the production of wastes. This is a great way to work towards a more environmentally friendly production process, something that is very important to us.

Now that we have seen how great lean production is, we also want to implement lean into our administration process. So our management team took a course in lean administration and is passing the examination this week.

Lean administration has taught us ways to make communication more effective and to reevaluate our administrative work process to identify small things that can end up making a great change and save resources. One such thing could be to decrease the amount of material that we buy, or to eliminate as much printing as possible. The concept Just-in-Time is useful in both lean production and administration. It simply means that the right thing should be at the right place at the right time. In administration this means for example to make sure that we place items we use continuously close to our workplace. Lean also teaches us to make decisions based on their long-term results rather than short-term financial benefits.

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