Resources lean concepts

Applying lean concepts to eliminate waste, improve efficiency, and lower production costs has become popular with senior-level managements. Minimizing waste is the foundation on which the lean concept is built. In a lean endeavor, activities or processes that consume resources, add cost, or require unproductive time without creating value are eliminated. The lean concept can be described as striving for excellence in operations in which each employee seeks to eliminate waste and participates in the smooth flow of value to the customer. 

BCSPs publication that resulted from the latest validation study— the sixth edition of the Certified Safety Professional Examination Guide—has an April 2011 date. That is fairly recent and adds to its credibility. Even though the study is short on lean concepts and sustainability, it is an excellent and highly reliable resource for the purposes of this chapter. And, it will be found that the knowledge and skill subjects listed are a close match with ABET requirements, what employers said in response to the NIOSH study, and the survey made by this author. 

This Technical Report is an excellent resource for safety professionals who want to understand how the lean process and safety principles can be melded to serve waste reduction purposes while maintaining acceptable risk levels. It provides guidance from the initial concept stage for design and redesign and addresses operational waste reduction applications. 

In summary, the researchers have applied the concepts above, by focusing on the concepts of Ohno (1998), Hudson et al. (2001), Wilson et al. (2008), and Nasser Mohd et al. (2009) to specify the criteria for performance measurement related to lean manufacmring, and in all twenty-four variables under all the five performance measurement perspectives (quality, time, finance, customer satisfaction, and human resources) as follows ... 

When work on a critical path stops because resources are busy elsewhere or critical resources are idle, the cause is likely to be in poor scheduling. The critical path keeps shifting because of the uncertainty of project work. Goldratt (1999) with his Critical Chain and theory of constraints pointed out that the calculation of floats can be misleading. The apparent buffer of time can evaporate due to preset times and allocation of resources. Building upon the concept of Critical Chain lean project management developed, and it comprises three major activities ... 

The second concept that needs to be reassessed and that needs to be integrated in conjunction with SCM is Lean. Lean is a tool that facilitates the elimination of waste. And waste can be identified in a multitude of resource areas. Any, and probably all, of the resource areas identified as part of the supply chain contain waste. Lean is the methodology that identifies the waste and then utilizes a bag of tools to attempt to eliminate this waste. The more waste that is eliminated, the greater the value-added time, resulting in greater throughput, lower costs. 

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