How do you benchmark and learn from the best practices of other Lean Manufacturing organizations or sectors?

What's key and where many organizations fail is not getting overwhelmed. Pick a metric that your facility is already tracking or is easy for you to start tracking. Assign people that understand that metric at a deep level and understand what it takes to make an impact. Agree with key stakeholders what success, failure, and timeline would look like for this initiative. Ensure that they're bought into the idea of pushing toward improving this metric and have a general idea of "things they can influence" to progress toward the goal. Remember that a small win at this stage will likely lead to further Lean Six Sigma adoption. An unattainable goal will lead to failure and abandonment of future initiatives.

Benchmarking and learning from other top Lean manufacturing organizations will guide in identifying areas of improvement and give you a more complete understanding of the big picture within your industry by comparing your operational results with the top Lean manufacturing organizations.

Before benchmarking and learning from other Lean Manufacturing organizations or sectors, it's important to define your purpose and scope. Determine the specific processes, outcomes, or metrics you want to improve and how they align with strategic objectives and customer needs. Identify current gaps and challenges and establish how progress and results will be measured. By defining your purpose and scope, you can prioritize efforts and allocate resources to the areas of improvement that will have the greatest impact. Have a good one and stay safe! #LeanManufacturing

Bench marking against an organisation which competes in similar market and region is a common practice. But to be a market leader an organisation needs to scan the industry and look for any gaps for potential new ventures!

Is your organisation/culture ready to accept change or listen to ideas? First prepare the workplace culture, ensure a clearly defined company purpose is understood by all, not just in terms of what success looks like but also how it benefits the people within the organisation. Forge an engaging leadership team with a regular presence on the shop floor, ready to offer help and support whilst listening to the views of the value creators, they will know what challenges are present within the day to day operation and probably already have many ideas of how to improve on these. With a clear purpose, leadership and an a culture willing to implement change, only then is it time to look at the performance of other organisations.

In addition, ensure the source of data is not corrupted. If you start with wrong data you end up with wrong decisions. Each region and market conditions are different, so its best to gain more insight.

This study purely focuses on lean methodology, however for a world class organisation both lean and agile methodology should be considered when making important choices. You can have world class automated machines, but if the culture within the organisation is not appealing or healthy you cannot achieve long term sustainability