Digitizing Lean Manufacturing

Lean manufacturing processes have revolutionized the way that many leading enterprises identify and eliminate waste in complex manufacturing environments, thus streamlining processes and reducing cycle times.
These processes and techniques can provide companies with considerable competitive advantages, enabling them to hit cost and revenue targets for over 80% of their products, according to research by the Aberdeen Group.However, in recent years economic, demographic and competitive realities have contributed to creating a challenging environment for product companies. Not only has this impacted on budgets, but also buying behavior and consumer expectations. This has created a massive shift in the demands on product manufacturers, altering their entire product development lifecycle.
For many companies, success now depends on the quality and speed of the decisions made. In an ever-expanding universe of product data from multiple disciplines and sources, being able to make sense of this information in a timely and intelligent manner is critical.
As a result, some businesses are looking at how digital manufacturing techniques and technologies can be implanted to help deliver lean planning, which in turn enables leaner production.

The Challenge
The ongoing global economic uncertainty continues to put persistent pressure on manufacturers today. It impacts credit and investments as well as consumer demand, which saw some fairly precipitous declines in revenues for all sectors.
These issues create investment shortages, budget freezes, and staff reductions leading to factory closings and efforts to push harder on short-term projects that provide quick return on investment.
The other aspect of lean production strategies during steep economical downturn is that much of your decisions are reactionary. This in the longer term adds waste to the system especially when you need to moveoperations due to a shutdown or loss of intellectual property through layoffs.
But this has led to some manufacturers questioning the value of lean processes. For instance, given that in short-term cycles the cost of optimization and eliminating waste can exceed the savings made, then something needs to change.
Connected to this is the question of relevance. In today's modern production era, are processes that were developed several years ago still relevant? There are people like Greg Fields, president of Bridgewright Management Consultants, who argue that no amount of continuous improvement will get companies where they need to be if they are busy tweaking systems that were designed and developed for a different environment, and that, in many cases, it's time to look at new processes from the ground up for today's economies.
There are several limits to these lean processes, but when combined with digital manufacturing can not only still be relevant, but in fact further optimize and streamline the entire product lifecycle management process.

Limits of Lean Manufacturing
Lean manufacturing can deliver a host of benefits, including improving capacity, efficiency, rework, overall performance, product quality and labour efficiency, and enthusiasm. It can help reduce waste in transportation, inventory, overproduction, over processing and defects, as well as cutting down on unnecessary movement of equipment or personnel and waiting for next production steps.
While production is the focus for most when implementing a lean initiative, there are still barriers to achieving the results lean strategies typically promise. Training is one such barrier, but this can only be addressed by the organization, while others involve an increasingly devastating impact to savings when considering the high cost of relocating or swapping out machinery.
Lastly, lean manufacturing processes are reliant on continuous improvement. This requires mechanisms to be in place that capture knowledge from production that can be shared back upstream, in order to achieve a continuous improvement strategy.
The common denominator here is that all of this effort typically gets focused on the existing production footprint. Traditional lean production strategies focus on optimization of existing manufacturing systems and, as a result, many organizations don't consider lean processes to be a close ally of digital manufacturing.