In the world of consumer goods and home and lifestyle, today’s fast-moving consumer trends demand fast delivery and quality at the lowest possible cost—for which lean programs in manufacturing are paramount. With the ever-present risk of potential disruptions to supply chain materials and manufacturing processes, lean programs have a pivotal role in ensuring competitiveness of operations and customer satisfaction.

Unfortunately, most lean programs remain disconnected from overall industrial transformation initiatives and often continue old practices while the rest of the business invests in new PLM, MES or APS and Supply Chain Planning systems. While industrial transformation programs abound in some shape or form, lean programs tend to still employ outdated tools and technologies.

Out with the old

Some of today’s approaches for manufacturing lean programs, quality and stand-up meetings are just too antiquated to keep up with the demands of consumer goods manufacturing today. The use of static whiteboards, spreadsheets and generally non-collaborative tools results in manufacturing and operations teams grossly missing out on opportunities to engage and realize the full potential and value of their interactions. This is not the only area where we can observe a digital or collaborative lag; a parallel example of this would be how some companies use spreadsheets for OEE programs or finite advanced production scheduling—and, unsurprisingly, encounter pitfalls. Today, most companies recognize that these tools just won’t cut it for such programs and have invested or are investing in replacing those antiquated approaches with new systems. The next frontier in lean programs has the potential for far-reaching benefits.

Trends driving lean progress

There are several trends impacting lean that are a permanent part of the manufacturing landscape, including personalization of products, supply chain disruptions and rapid product changeovers because of accelerated new product introductions. These trends impact processes, quality monitoring, issue detection and corrective action, and focus on the health and safety of workers. Lean programs are necessary in order to act more efficiently and effectively against the backdrop of these trends, putting more pressure on bringing in more experts, dealing more data, tracking and resolving issues and looking for trends that could open areas of the plant or product for improvements.

Lean into digital collaboration

A new approach to digital lean programs is Dassault Systèmes’ 3DLean from DELMIA, which can quickly jumpstart digital transformation across the enterprise for consumer goods and home and lifestyle manufactures. 3DLean is a modern approach to lean and is a quick win for industrial transformation. Operations and manufacturing teams today need a system that is cloud based, collaborative and interactive—able to reveal rich information in the digital form required for issue identification and resolution. It should allow for remote workers or extended team members to participate, promote a lean culture as well as track and alert team members of actions required to improve operational effectiveness and efficiency. This is precisely what 3DLean can help accomplish, enabling you to harness the collective intelligence of your organization to reveal and improve operations.

Leaders who have embarked on transforming their lean, continuous improvement and quality programs with such an approach have found several tangible benefits:

• Simplify live team interactions regardless of where or how people work
• Help teams communicate in engaging and natural ways
• Empower teams to work autonomously
• Visually interact with 3D content and data
• Transform data, team knowledge and know-how into meaningful evidence for all
• Discover the art of the possible using Lean principles
• Assign and track decisions and actions in real time
• Make ‘Lean thinking’ a standard part of business, teams and culture
• Capitalize lean productivity gains every meeting, every day

For more information and to discover how to jumpstart industrial transformation in consumer goods and home and lifestyle manufacturing, read our ebook.