This shop has a plan for dramatically expanding its contract machining business in high-value markets.
Before I visited ADEX Machining Technologies, I was missing an important point about lean manufacturing.
I associate “lean” with identifying and removing sources of waste in the production process—wasted time, wasted cost and wasted effort. This is right.
However, I have always seen this waste reduction as an exercise in greater efficiency and faster response to the customer. This is right, too, as far as it goes.
But this view overlooks something significant. It minimizes a value of lean that might be vital to the future of a manufacturing business, particularly a contract manufacturer. Specifically, a lean process is scalable. One reason many manufacturing businesses level out at certain sizes is because of the burdens of inefficiency their processes carry. These facilities function well with those burdens today, but they would not be able to manage under the weight of that inefficiency growing larger. Therefore, getting impediments to productivity out of the way not only improves the manufacturing process today, but also sets up that process to expand into greater activity tomorrow. To put it simply, the manufacturer that wants to grow ought to consider going lean.
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