IQ Lean: Your IQ Performance Improvement Partner

IQ Lean is a methodology that uses specific techniques to solve problems with known solutions. It can eliminate the seven wastes from your process, reduce your lead time, increase production and reduce space requirements. This can all be done with the same amount of resources and people. IQ Lean can help improve lead times and reduce waste for both you and your supplier, and meet your customers demand just in time. IQ Lean will motivate people to reduce waste and to improve their working environment. It empowers people to be involved in the planning of their day to day activities and develop cross-training and skill sets.

7 Wastes

Transportation

Inventory

Motion

Waiting

Over Processing

Over Production

Defects

Remember

TIMWOOD

5 'S'

Select/Sort

Set in Order

Shine/Sweep

Simplify/Standardize
Sustain

These are English translations for the orginal Japanese words

Seiri
Seiton
Seiso
Seiketsu
Shitsuke

One Piece Flow

The essence of this concept is to take one part, perform one action and hand it off to the next step. This will reduce wait times, and reduce defects by catching problems as soon as they arrive, and not after a batch of 500, 1000, more?

Work Cells

This is simply the group of people and machines required for a process. When planned and arranged correctly, the process will move smoothly without interuption at a pace that will ensure the customer gets their product defect free on time every time.

Visual Controls

Often called Kanban. This is a simple way of indicating that a step needs to be performed. It can be as simple as having two bins for parts, when one is empty, it is put on a shelf to indicate it needs to be filled. There are many variations of this concept, but they all provide a quick easy way of seeing the state of the process and what needs to happen next.