SLAM — A Case Study in Applying Lean to Job Shops

Abstract

Lean production has been applied broadly within manufacturing, but mostly to production systems that can be structured as flow lines. Can lean be applied to production systems that produce small numbers of a wide variety of custom products and thus do not lend themselves to a flow line structure; i.e., to job shops? Systems structured as job shops belong at the same end of the spectrum of production system types as do projects, so finding how to take job shops lean could have important implications for both manufacturing job shops and the application of lean to project based production systems such as those producing capital facilities, developing consumer products, and engineering software. Spancrete, a Midwest fabricator of concrete products, is achieving great success with its lean implementation. The primary tool is value stream mapping, which is done by employee teams with participants drawn from every level in the organizational hierarchy. Substantial performance improvements have been made, but arguably the most important change is cultural, the transformation of Spancrete into a learning organization. This paper reports the methodology and the results Spancrete has achieved and suggests how their methodology might be applied by others.

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