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Lean Production - Lean Tools

5S in Practice - Sort and Straighten

There are many different tools that you can use  within the different phases of 5S.

Value Stream Mapping Template

Value Stream Mapping is one of the most used tools in Lean manufacturing to map the flow of your process.

5S Audit Templates

One of the most important part of a sustainable 5S culture is the 5S mini audit (

Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED)

Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED) is a tool developed by Shingo to reduce change over times on machines.

A3 Thinking

The A3 is a tool that is used within Toyota as management tool (Shook, 2008).

8 Steps of Future State VSM design

Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is one of the most important lean tools, used to improve the flow of materials and informa

Practical Problem Solving (3C & 5Why)

Next to improving the flow of goods and services in a value stream, Lean also focusses on improving the flow of probl

Takt-, Cycle-, Process-, and Lead time

Lean distinguishes itself form other methods by focusing mainly on time.

Leader Standard Work

A Lean organization is driven by its standards.

Yamazumi

Yamazumi (also known as Balance sheets) is a tool, which’s name could be translated into ´stacking mountain´.

Kanban

Kanban is a Japanese term that can be translated into ´Visual signal´ and is used to visualize production and transpo

One Piece Flow & U-cells

One-piece flow means products flow form workstation to workstation without waiting and is therefore the most desirabl

The Supermarket

The supermarket is one of the three pull strategies that can be implemented as connection bet

Pull connections - The 3 strategies

A Pull process is a process in which a workstation starts to work on his next order only when there is a fre

First-In-First-Out (FIFO)

The lean strategy focusses on creating flow of products and services in 

Heijunka

Heijunka is a Japanese Tool, which is used to balance production.

Ms.Outlook (E-mail)

For most managers, they are the most time consuming activity there is: E-mails.

SIPOC

The SIPOC is a visual rendering of Deming´s System Model (Scholtes, 1998), a Model that is used to visualize the comp